Twitter and Facebook are providing more space for the Saudi public not only to voice support to the Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans but also to call for their own rights.
The Middle East and North Africa Facebook Demographics, a study by Carrington Malin from Spot on Public Relations, says that in 2010 there were 15 million Facebook users in the region, half of whom use English as their primary language. The top five countries using Facebook are Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman) have five million Facebook users with Saudi Arabia and the UAE representing 45 percent of the total.
An in-depth look at this study by Arab News revealed that only eight percent of the Kingdom’s population (Saudis and expatriates combined) use Facebook. Meanwhile, 31 percent of the population of the UAE, 44 percent of Qatar’s, 17 percent of Kuwait’s, 51 percent of Bahrain's and 5.1 percent of Oman's are Facebook users. Only 4.2 percent of people in Egypt are Facebook members while 14.7 of Tunisians and 5.6 of Moroccans are Facebook users.
The study stated that the Kingdom is one of the fastest growing Facebook communities in Middle East and North Africa region, especially among those using Facebook in Arabic. The number of users in the Kingdom has increased by more than three times from 2008 to 2009.
Twitter has only 5.5 million users in the Middle East. However, ComScore Data suggests that users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa are growing rapidly.
The study said the number of users in the Middle East increased by 104 percent from 2008 to 2009.
Ali Al-Difairi, a Saudi presenter at Al-Jazeera TV, sees social networking as a way to express personal opinions and stand up for specific views. He said that the implementation of suggestions offered on Twitter depends on the trust the decision makers have in the social media. For him, Twitter provides not only the opinion of the youth coming from middle class communities, it also offers the views of people in media and culture.
“The case in Saudi Arabia is different,” he said. “We have our calls that are not as high as that of other countries.”
The level of awareness is higher in Twitter compared to Facebook, he added.
This, he said, is probably because Facebook attracts various layers of society unlike Twitter, which is still used by people in the region who belong to the same social strata, have similar education levels and are relatively from the same age group.
Eman Al-Nafjan, who runs the Saudiwoman’s Weblog (http://saudiwoman.wordpress.com/), stressed that people on Twitter are very outspoken.
“They encourage each other and make each other more bold,” she said. “Before Twitter and Facebook we didn’t even know what our neighbors were feeling or thinking.”
Al-Nafjan said those who call for more women's rights in Saudi Arabia are criticized by three different groups: men who look down on the call, women who feel such comments malign the country and conservatives who feel women should be subservient to men.
Twitter users are rapidly increasing, she said. And for Saudis who utilize social networking, she said the primary subjects are corruption, political transparency, discrimination against women, women's treatment by government departments, the issue of women being allowed to drive and the need to ban child marriages.
