How difficult is it to be a blogger in Saudi Arabia? Not so hard, it turns out. According to “Saudi Jeans,” the nom de plume for 25-year-old Ahmed Al-Omran, many topics can be discussed by the more than 10,000 bloggers in Saudi Arabia without facing reprisals from local authorities.
“I avoid writing about the royal family,” he told a video conference with American bloggers last week. Otherwise, quite a number of political and social topics can be discussed.
Saudi government media watchers do occasionally try to block certain views, but without much success. “They can’t control the media any more but they don’t seem to realize it. Whatever gets censored gets on the Internet a few hours later,” Al-Omran says.
“Saudi Jeans” is widely read – about 30-50,000 page views per month, in English. Ahmed also writes a separate blog in Arabic, but the content is different. (Al Jazeera in English is also quite different in content — more liberal — than in Arabic. In the same way, Saudi bloggers writing in English feel less constrained than when they write in Arabic.)
We asked “Saudi Jeans” how the political protests in Iran affected expression on the other side of the Persian Gulf. “For one thing, public demonstrations are not allowed in Saudi Arabia,” says Al-Omran, so the very idea of demonstrations taking place in Iran was quite important. “When we saw the importance of Twitter in Iran we began to apply it here (in Saudi Arabia) as well, but authorities began blocking it,” he says.
“What do we do when we want to protest publicly? We go to the Internet and start a campaign online,” says Saudi Jeans. Eventually, the blogosphere over Saudi Arabia may get more crowded and more free. It is not the same as an entirely free media environment, but it’s a start.
