JIZAN: Prince Muhammad Bin Nasser, Emir of Jizan, has joined a handful of other senior officials in opening a page on Facebook and using it to communicate with a younger and more technologically-minded public. Yassin Al-Qassim, head of public relations at the Emirate, told Al-Watan Arabic daily that Prince Muhammad had met with a group of Facebook users at his weekly open meeting after reading their comments on the social networking site. “The Emir of Jizan is always extremely interested in hearing the issues that concern the people of the region,” he said. “He instructed the Governor of Abu Areish to hold an urgent meeting with a group of youngsters who had posted ideas on Facebook, in order to discuss their views and suggestions and see if they could be carried out in the public interest.” The Emir follows in the footsteps of Adel Fakieh and Abdul Aziz Khoja, ministers of labor and culture and information respectively, in embracing popular modern forms of communication. Last year Fakieh said he would set up a “work team” formed of Facebook friends from his personal page to help tackle unemployment, with individuals selected from previous contributors to his “Dialogue with the Minister” page, set up specifically to look at the issue. Fakieh was beaten to the initiative by Khoja, however. In June 2009 a chance encounter between a journalist from a local newspaper and Khoja on his site resulted in a published interview on the nature of press freedom, the responsibilities of the media and the role of the ministry, after officials confirmed that the Facebook Khoja was indeed the Minister of Culture and Information. Other Facebook identities have proved less reliable, however, prompting a denouncement last month from Issa Al-Ghaith, Adviser to the Minister of Justice, who declared that impersonating prominent officials and personalities on Facebook is a “criminal act prohibited by Shariah and punishable under the Kingdom's cyber laws”. Al-Ghaith said he had “personal experience” of the matter when he found certain pages on the site were blocked to him because someone had already assumed his identity. The Ministry of Interior shortly prior to that issued a statement denying claims that Prince Naif Bin Abdul Aziz, Second Deputy Premier and Minister of Interior, had an account on Facebook or any webpage on the Internet.
