Saeed Al-Khotani and Fatima Muhammad Saudi Gazette
RIYADH — About 800 Saudi tweeters, including 150 women, gathered in Riyadh on Monday for their first meeting to discuss the effective use of social media in commerce, literature and other fields. The gathering, held under the title “Saudi Tweeters”, was organized by Prince Muhammad Bin Salman's philanthropic organization known as “Musk Charity”. A number of leading culture and media personalities attended the forum at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The first session discussed censorship on Twitter and whether it should be official or self-imposed. The session discussed ethical controls in the micro-blogging site. The second session deliberated the developing and spreading of ideas through Twitter while the third discussed using the site as a commercial platform. In the fourth session the attendants discussed the issue of problems that may arise while tweeting and the publishing of conflicts among tweeters. They also talked about how journalists could benefit from Twitter in their work. A number of women participants criticized the forum for not having any women speakers. “The exclusion of women from the podium is an act of sexism and a deliberate negligence of half of society,” tweeted a young Saudi woman who identified herself by her first name Hatoon. Khaled Al-Ammar, a businessman, criticized the selection of both the attendants and the speakers. “This forum does not represent me as a tweeter followed by more than 59,000 tweeters,” he said. Yasser Al-Ghaslan, a Saudi writer, said the criticism against the forum was a sign of its marketing success, the dream of any event organizer. “Any publicity is good publicity,” he said. Abdul Rahman Al-Murshid, a journalist, said such activities would contribute in bridging the gap and curbing differences of opinions among tweeters. “This is an unprecedented initiative in the Arab world that gathered a large number of tweeters together to discuss their issues without any reservations,” he said. He pointed out that a negative aspect of tweeting is that it opens doors for all people without any controls. “Every tweeter considers himself or herself an editor in chief, writing what they want and concealing what they want,” he said. Al-Murshid described Twitter as a “ghost site”, especially when tweeters use false names. “For this reason we are not surprised to read a large amount of false information,” he said.
