In January 2019, the plight of Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun captured global attention. The young Saudi woman, attempting to escape her family, found herself stranded in Thailand after her passport was confiscated. Armed with her smartphone, she used social media to alert international organisations about the fate awaiting her. Canada eventually granted her asylum. The Saudi chargé d’affaires in Thailand then declared that the authorities should have deprived her of her phone, thereby revealing the unprecedented power of this connected device.
That same year, activist Manal al-Sharif, known for cofounding the Women2Drive movement in 2011 and popularising it on social networks, closed her Twitter and Facebook accounts. The very social media platforms that had first allowed her to liberate her voice had become a trap, serving Saudi propaganda and misinformation efforts. Instruments of resistance and feminist mobilisation that resonated worldwide, social media platforms also proved to be oppressive weapons.
By the late 2010s, countless Saudi women were leveraging social media to build both small businesses and larger enterprises.
