Okaz/Saudi Gazette

JEDDAH — Protests have gained momentum in the Arab world against the social media giant Facebook for picking Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Yemeni Nobel Prize winner Tawakkol Karman as a member of its content oversight board.

Facebook’s move has caused massive outrage in the region, with activists from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates launching on Twitter the largest boycott campaign against Facebook and its affiliate Instagram. They are urging users to uninstall these apps from their smart phones in protest against the choice of Karman.

There are thousands of active users of social media, including prominent Saudi and Egyptian figures, who made the boycott call of the two platforms, stressing that the choice of Karman would lead to a proliferation of extremist and terrorist ideologies into the content of the social media platforms. The hashtag “No to Facebook in the Kingdom” is the most circulated hashtag on the Twitter account.

A veteran Saudi journalist Othman Al-Omair, publisher and editor-in-chief of the online news site Elaph, announced that he is quitting Facebook and Instagram platforms in protest against the social media giant’s move to choose a person with a tainted past. He said that it makes the site’s environment inappropriate for an exchange of free opinions.

Khalid Al-Sulaiman, noted Okaz columnist, joined the boycott list, declaring in his article Sunday: “Personally, I stopped using Facebook since several years. I think that many people will abandon it in support of the moral principles of freedom of expression that Facebook will no longer be able to represent after accommodating a person like Karman. It will lead to the loss of the platform’s credibility and trust among a large number of its users in the Arab world, which has suffered consequences of the chaos and destruction caused by the activities of the terrorist Brotherhood, and its ideology adopted and supported by Karman.”

Supporting this view, prominent Saudi writer Hani Al-Dhaheri, through his article in Okaz newspaper, underlined the need to initiate formal negotiations with the Facebook administration in order to force it to back down from its decision, calling it as a “big strategic mistake.”

Meanwhile, Saudi journalist Salah Makharish confirmed that Facebook will lose its pioneers due to the terrorist Karman. “Karman, who obtained the Nobel Prize with the Qatari funds and support, had abandoned the Yemeni people during the war, and settled down in Turkey,” he said on his Twitter account, asking “who supported and brought her to this position?"

John Talaat, a member of the Communications Committee in the Egyptian parliament, called on parliamentarians from various Arab countries to take an urgent action under the umbrella of the Arab Parliament to object to the appointment of Karman, a proponent of hate speeches.

A large number of media persons, intellectuals and bloggers expressed their anger over the Facebook’s move for putting the fate of their ideas in the hands of an activist who takes her inspiration from Brotherhood as well as from the Qatari and Turkish intelligence. They emphasized that the time has come for a collective boycott to escape hate speeches and extremist content proliferating into the social media.