Saudi Royal Family Using Their Stake In Twitter To Do Damage Control In The Wake Of Jamal Khashoggi’s Death

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Saudi Royal Family Using Their Stake In Twitter To Do Damage Control In The Wake Of Jamal Khashoggi’s Death

October 24. 2018

Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud

Saudi royal Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud has a stake in the social networking site Twitter.com. Alsaud owns 34,900,000 shares of Twitter. He owns more shares in the company than the site’s co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey. Recent developments reveal his part ownership of the company allowed him to give his input on certain decisions made regarding the site.

For example, people have been condemning his relative, Saudi royal, Mohammed bin Salman, believed to be responsible for ordering the grisly murder of Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who was dismembered alive by a 15-man hit squad. Reports indicate bin Salman sent the hit squad, which included his bodyguard, to brutally kill Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Khashoggi's fingers were sent to Saudi Arabia and the rest of his remains hidden in the garden of the Saudi consul in Turkey.

Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud

Salman hated Khashoggi for writing articles about the Saudi royal family’s misconduct. Social networking has expressed its outrage over the brutal murder. Mohammed bin Salman is being slammed all over social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and You Tube, for Khashoggi‘s death.

However, a few days ago, during peak hours on Twitter, many tweets began to trend in Arabic praising the Saudi royal family and declaring their alleged innocence in Khashoggi's death. It is rare that the top trends on Twitter and during peak hours are in Arabic. The two top topics were in relation to the Saudi royals. Not to mention, Twitter chooses the topics that trend. It is clear Alsaud used his influence as a big shareholder to get the family trending.