Twitter cultivated Saudi Arabian leaders to boost the use of its platform in the Middle East. At the same time, it prided itself on providing a forum where the country’s dissidents and activists could anonymously post their criticism of the royal family and organise.
Assistant US attorney Colin Sampson elicited testimony from the witnesses in an attempt to substantiate the government’s charge that Abouammo, a US citizen fluent in Arabic, was recruited as “an operative, a mole” by Bader Al-Asaker, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “right-hand man”. Abouammo faces numerous charges including acting as an illegal foreign agent in the US and obstruction of justice, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The trial is scheduled to take about two weeks.
Abouammo’s prosecution contrasts with US President Joe Biden’s more recent attempt to warm relations with Saudi Arabia, a paradox epitomised by his controversial fist bump with the crown prince, known as MBS, whose photograph prosecutors featured for jurors atop a pyramid of figures they say are responsible for the breach at Twitter.
Katie Jacobs Stanton, a former vice-president of global media at Twitter and Abouammo’s supervisor, recounted how the two visited the home of Saudi billionaire and royal Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud. She rode a camel and they had a two-hour dinner with the prince, she said. Prosecutors showed jurors a 2015 email Abouammo sent to Stanton and the global media team announcing he brought “onboard of a new government leader.
The spy who deplatformed me