One of the pleasures of living in the West is that one doesn’t have to be bothered with bad news. The Syrian civil war, sectarian violence in Africa and missing jets need not register on anybody’s radar if you are proficient in playing Xbox, retweeting celebrity musings on Twitter and watching “The X Factor.”
People can be as dumb as they want and not feel the slightest bit guilty. During the first decade of this century, Saudis were treated with more openness and more exposure to dialogue that aired our differences within our own society and the world outside our borders. It was a promising beginning. Twitter, Facebook and now Instagram broadened those horizons and did much good over the past few years. If it hadn’t been for young Saudis on Twitter and Facebook, we might have never seen justice for those individuals responsible for the death and destruction following the Jeddah floods.
Today, we look back on that period as the golden age of openness because there is no such thing anymore. Recently, an Internet services company unveiled new technology that can sort through every social network post to determine “positive” and “negative” speech and pinpoint who made the post and where it came from. The program can read 13 languages and 570 Arabic dialects, including 278 Saudi dialects. Anything posted that is deemed negative goes directly to the Saudi government. As one tech expert said: “This will enable the body to immediately intercept and control the abuse before it aggravates.”
As long as social network users comment on “Arabs Got Talent,” make YouTube parodies about young guys dancing in their under clothes and verbally harass young women for daring to venture into the social media arena, then we are all safe. But since no one knows the threshold for what is deemed “negative” commentary and what could destabilize Saudi society, it would be suicide to engage in any meaningful political discussion about Saudis and their role in the international community. We already live in a society that marginalizes Saudis who go against the grain — whether its how one dresses or what spouse one chooses — now thoughts expressed on Twitter are criminalized.
This is not an Arab thing or a Saudi thing, but a universal thing. The US and the UK, for all their talk about free speech, has basically criminalized any support or sympathy for jihadists. A visit by law enforcement is fairly common for individuals who express extremist thought. We don’t live in a democracy in Saudi Arabia, so it’s perfectly reasonable to tamp down on extremist rhetoric given the irresponsibility of some conservative leaders who seem to think that fighting in Syria is perfectly fine despite a government edict that says otherwise.
It’s not surprising that Saudi Arabia has taken a similar approach to dealing with the issue of speech. Unfortunately, though, we were on the cusp of great things in developing healthy dialogue that could have led to a better understanding of ourselves and of non-Saudis who have negative perceptions. Now that door has been slammed in our face precisely because Saudis don’t know where they stand.
Now, more than ever, there is an urgent need to keep our country stable and to ensure that extremists are marginalized if not arrested for supporting causes that are obviously un-Islamic. But we live under the threat that anything interpreted as anti-government can result in jail time.
If we are to live in a society that values Saudi intellect, then the red lines must be clearly established about what is deemed as language harmful to our stability. Jihadi ideology? Certainly. But does the outrage of young Saudis over the senseless deaths of Jeddawis during the floods constitute today speech that destabilizes our society? Without clear, codified laws addressing these nuances, our growth as a society will be stunted to great detriment of future generations.
While celebrity tweets and video games are fun distractions, they do not make for a great or productive society. Open, honest dialogue does, even if there are limits. If only we knew what those limits were.
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