Public demonstrations are banned in Saudi Arabia. We don’t have codified laws, so you will not find any official text that explicitly says it, but everybody knows it. What do we do when we want to protest publicly? We go to the internet and start a campaign online. Back in 2006 I wrote, ”Online campaigning is appealing to many people because most of the time it doesn’t take much resources.” Most of the time it takes little more than starting a freely hosted blog, design a few banners, maybe add a mailing list, and viola! you have a campaign.
This year alone, we have seen a plethora of campaigns that goes from the useful to the useless, and everything in between. We had the Khalooha… series, which covered topics like greed of car dealerships, women’s rights, and marriage expenses among other things. Most recently we had two confusing, similar but apparently opposing campaigns on the issue of male guardianship. But what I want to talk about today is a campaign called SaudiFlager (sic).
SaudiFlager’s goal is to clean up YouTube of videos offending to Saudi Arabia by flagging them. In addition to the unfortunate misspelled name, I believe this campaign has two main problems. First, what is an offending video? What are the criteria for such thing? I mean, what is offending to you can be quite harmless to me, right? So who gets to decide which videos are offending? Second, YouTube is already heavily censored by CITC. Do we need another layer of censorship?
I’m all for free speech, so don’t get me wrong. If you feel strongly offended by a video on the website, go ahead and flag it. Knock yourself out, I’m not going to stop you. Actually, I can’t stop you. But I think that organizing a campaign for such purpose is a just a waste of time and effort. What is worse, it is enforcing yet another form of censorship and that is the last thing we need. CITC is already doing a great job at it that I find myself occasionally amazed by how dedicated they are to this job.
This dedication is shown clearly in their latest blocking spree, which included Twitter profiles like those of @Mashi97 and @abualkhair. Blocking @Mashi97 was particularly strange because it came after he tweeted about having fried eggs for breakfast, which made him think that maybe someone at CITC does not like eggs. Also, what CITC don’t seem to realize is that blocking profile pages on Twitter does not prevent the users from updating. Go figure.
Which brings me back to online campaigns: should we start one to unblock these guys? I think we should, but currently I’m busy with another campaign of mine: Saudi Unflagger. Who is in?
Saudi Jeans 
You are a hope for the globe!
I do not like green eggs and HAM!!!
Couldn’t you just start SaudiFlagger? Anybody who knows how to spell “flagger” will end up at yours, and you’ll explain that your goal is not to have more censorship, so win on you!
Good idea :-)
Great idea– this type of co-opting is done routinely eg. aljazeera.com–nothing to do with the real aljazeera except intercept traffic and spout the opposite ethos.
SaudiFlagger would do the same, but to better purpose.
I believe organizing campaigns is becoming a really trendy thing among young Saudis …. especially after some of the successful campaigns which caught the attention of the media.
I mean come on … who would turn down their 5 minutes of fame, the opportunity of being interviewed on national newspapers with a carefully chosen photo being displayed along that! not a bad thing huh?
On a serious note, campaigns here are the voice for the voiceless, in this country that has been giving the deaf ear for its youth – and its elderly for that matter- for so long it has become an essential mean for making ones voice heard.
Ask active young Saudis and they’ll tell you that:
“Yeah, go ahead -do or say that – meanwhile I’ll start organizing your freedom campaign!!”
has become a popular joke phrase among them when discussing the kinds of things one wish or want to say or do that would get him/her in trouble with the authorities!!
As proud members of our nation, we have cause to feel offense whenever it is unfairly maligned.
However, we must far more urgently deal with a set of issues far more central to our lives.
Before we utilise time on efforts regarding issues that are unfair, I would remind us all that we should first focus on issues that cause us to be unfree.
So long as we are ruled by the clerical establishment, and all the attendant problems that are the result of such misrule, we will invite unfair and hateful comments by those who live outside our nation.
Only when we have a more normal situation will we be truly able to advocate the idea that our nation is not bizarre and backward oriented.
Thus, while I agree that it is hurtful when we are unfairly maligned, I would nevertheless state that so long as we live in our current situation of bizarre misrule asserted to be required by divine law, we ourselves invite such malignant views by outsiders.
We can and must do better.
As long as no one can see the updates, I don’t think CITC cares much if they update.
Would someone IN KSA mind reporting those two sites to Herdict.org? It helps us track inaccessiblity (filtering) around the globe.
What can I do with Twitter?