Saudi snitching app turns citizens into social media police

A Saudi app that lets ordinary people “play the role of a police officer” may have alerted authorities to the tweets of a student whose sentencing to 34 years in jail has drawn international condemnation.

Just weeks after the verdict against Salma al-Shehab - a doctoral candidate at Britain’s Leeds University - rights groups say another woman was given a 45-year sentence for her social media posts - highlighting a crackdown targeting women online.

Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani was convicted of “using the internet to tear the (Saudi) social fabric”, according to DAWN, a Washington-based human rights group.

While it is not clear how Qahtani’s posts were detected, rights groups think Shehab was reported by citizens using Kollona Amn, a government app that lets citizens alert authorities to everyday incidents like road accidents or suspicious behaviour.

“I went into your account, and I found it to be pitiful and full of trash, I took several pictures and I sent them to Kollona Amn,” one user posted below a comment by Shehab, a screenshot reviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation showed.

Kollona Amn, meaning “we are all security” in Arabic, has been downloaded more than a million times from the Google Play store.

Despite billing itself as a utility app to speed up “rescue missions”, rights campaigners say it helps authorities cast a wider net for activists and dissidents seen as a threat to the Saudi government.

“The problem in Saudi Arabia is that their understanding of a crime is much wider than what is recognisable under international law,” said Rothna Begum, women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

“It is so broad and vague; anything could be a crime.”

The Saudi Ministry of Communications and Information could not be reached for comment, but officials have said previously that the country does not have political prisoners.

“We have prisoners in Saudi Arabia who have committed crimes and who were put to trial by our courts and were found guilty,” Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir told Reuters in July.

Digital vigilantism

rights groups say government-employed Twitter troll armies scour social media on the lookout for dissent, harassing anyone who appears to digress from the official line.

But without the kind of surveillance made possible via the Kollona Amn app, rights activists say it would have been difficult for the government to detect Shehab’s Twitter presence.

Twitter users can use Kollona Amn to flag up other users’ tweets by tagging the app’s account, or the handle of the country’s state security agency.

Lina al-Hathloul, head of monitoring and communication at ALQST, a rights group, said she has documented at least eight other instances of online accounts tagging Kollona Amn’s account under activists’ tweets.

“They really want civil society to be invisible, they don’t want people to exist, not even online,” she added.

Around the world, similar apps have given rise to a wave of digital vigilantism - from tools that let people tip off the police to speeding drivers to breaches of Covid-19 rules.

They are often controversial.

In South Africa, WhatsApp chat groups that double up as neighbourhood watches have been criticised for being racist, while in India, so-called cyber volunteers recruited by the government go after online content that they deem to be illegal or anti-national.