(CN) — X, formerly known as Twitter, prevailed in a lawsuit by a Saudi Arabian activist who claimed the social media juggernaut disclosed his personal information to the kingdom's secret police, leading to his kidnapping, torture and imprisonment.
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco on Friday granted X's request to dismiss the racketeering and Alien Tort Act allegations brought by Areej al-Sadhan and his sister, who lives in the United States and filed the lawsuit.
The judge agreed with the social media platform that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act claims — which accused X of collaborating in a criminal enterprise with Saudi Arabia — were brought too late. He also wasn't persuaded that the complaint made a plausible case that X conspired with Saudi Arabia to help them track down anonymous X users who criticized the government.
Al-Sadhan was kidnapped in 2018 by the Saudi secret police and brutally tortured. He was convicted at a sham trial three years later, where the prosecutor presented as evidence 200 printed tweets from his account, @Sama7ti, the same anonymous account for which the X employees provided the Saudi government with his personal information. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The Justice Department in 2019 charged two former X employees and a Saudi man with acting as illegal agents for the Saudi government for providing the private information of users to the kingdom's authorities in 2014 and 2015.
Al-Sadhan, through his sister, claims that X had a quid-pro-quo deal with the Saudi government whereby in exchange for large investments it provided the government with private information of its users.
This didn't add up, the judge said, because the $300 million invested in 2011, when Twitter was privately held, by Kingdom Holding Co. occurred long before the two X employees began accessing confidential user data and send them to their contact in Saudi Arabia. A subsequent investment in 2015, that doubled the investment firm's stake, came after the company was publicly traded, and the money went to shareholders who sold their stock, not X.
"X did not benefit financially from this purchase of publicly traded stock in the marketplace," Chen said. "Thus, there was no quid-pro-quo."
The judge also noted that there was no plausible allegations that X knew its employees were collaborating with the Saudi government before the FBI confronted the company with this information in late 2015. A subsequent meeting of former CEO Jack Dorsey and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in June of 2016, Chen said, was hardly the alleged clear evidence of a conspiracy.
"If X and the King of Saudi Arabia were conspiring together, they would not have had a meeting that was photographed and posted online six months after the FBI found that there was a Saudi espionage problem at X," the judge observed. "Instead, X would be trying to distance itself from Saudi officials as much as possible."
Saudi Arabia is also a named defendant in the lawsuit, but its government hasn't responded to the claims.
Jim Walden, an attorney for al-Sadhan and his sister, said they plan to appeal the ruling,
"We seek justice for the al-Sadhan family and accountability against Twitter and its conspirators," Walden said.
Follow @edpettersson
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