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Saudi woman given 34-year prison sentence for using Twitter | Saudi Arabia | The Guardian
A Saudi student at Leeds University who had returned home to the kingdom for a holiday has been sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account and for following and retweeting dissidents and activists.
This is another reminder that social media is not a safe space for free expression. Posts and retweets that express sympathy for violence, sedition, support for unpopular causes or anything in the opaque category of “extremist” thinking can lead to incarceration in your own country or the denial of entry into others, even the western so-called democracies. A cursory web search will reveal arrests in the UK, Germany and France. Israel arrested 390 Palestinians last year for incitement on social media.
If it isn’t a nation state that comes down on you, it can be individual vigilantes who would like to see you dead. Having your own website like this one is probably just as likely to invoke the interest of the authorities. It no doubt depends on how dangerous it looks and the circulation it gets – but you can never know about that.
It is far safer to remain anonymous. True anonymity is tricky, because it depends on never making mistakes. In any case, you have probably already expressed yourself more freely than was wise in posts that will remain for posterity on the internet, a place that never forgives or forgets. Still, the web is humongous, and older data are buried under more recent data, so it is never too late to start taking an interest in privacy.
In my case, I figure that I’m at a stage when I’m never going to be looking for a job again or running for public office. The opinions I express may diverge from the mainstream but, in my domicile, would be unlikely to serve as grounds for arrest. My profile and risk factor are low. I may be barred from travel to some countries, but that’s something I can live with too.
Laws and conditions change. What is acceptable now may later become a crime. What seems to be private today may be in the hands of investigators tomorrow. That’s a risk we all take as soon as we open our mouths to say anything, or click on any button to post or publish to the web.
Links of the day
I think I’m spending too much time again reading the news. Mostly I’m reading stories that have, strictly speaking, no actual bearing on my life, so I grow agitated about matters that needn’t concern me. This is a phenomenon of the news media, though the psychological effect is similar to that of fiction: we read or watch something that is contrived in the mind of a writer or filmmaker, and our emotional reaction is almost as deep as if it were real and affected us personally. So we return to the theme of the interconnectedness of reality and fiction. On the TV news, particularly in featured stories, and in documentaries, there is the conscious effort to emulate what we are used to in watching our favourite TV series. The addition of background music, close-ups portraying the expression of emotions and other tricks of the film-trade all duplicate the experience of watching a TV drama. It’s one reason that I prefer to read the news rather than watch it.
Welcome to the freeport, where turbocapitalism tramples over British democracy | George Monbiot | The Guardian Wow, another evil scheme I didn’t know about. How do they get away with things like this?
Uproar after Mahmoud Abbas in Berlin accuses Israel of ’50 Holocausts’ | Mahmoud Abbas | The Guardian Words are wind. It’s doubtful whether any Israeli decision-maker actually cares what he says as long as he continues to do Israel’s bidding – they are not going to find a more moderate or pliable Palestinian leader. For ordinary Israeli citizens Abu Mazen just reinforces their negative stereotype of Palestinians. What Germans may be thinking is hard to guess. However in modern diplomacy outrage is usually staged. Even genuinely sickening and egregious episodes like the Khashoggi murder can be swept under the rug, if not today, then tomorrow. Israel can continue its brutal occupation without fearing reprisals. Russia can look forward to being welcomed back into the community of nations and Ukraine forgotten, as soon as it becomes economically or politically expedient.