As of 17 June 2025, the House of Saud has made its latest authoritarian statement—not with a palace edict, but with the execution of journalist Turki al-Jasser, whose real crime, campaigners say, was investigating royal corruption and voicing dissent on social media. Seven years after his arrest, Turki al-Jasser’s fate reads like a warning etched in binary code: in Saudi Arabia, the distance from a tweet to the gallows is shorter than ever.
According to reports from the Committee to Protect Journalists, al-Jasser’s sentence was justified by the usual catch-alls: “treason” and “terrorism”—legal fig leaves Saudi prosecutors routinely drape over anyone who rattles the regime’s cage. In reality, rights groups and international media outlets are united in their assessment: al-Jasser’s years behind bars, torture, and now execution were punishment for exposing corruption and calling out the iron rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Al-Jasser’s story began as an investigative journalist unafraid to probe the House of Saud’s vast fortunes and secretive machinations. His online activity, particularly on Twitter, attracted the kingdom’s ever-expanding digital surveillance dragnet—a system that, activists allege, is aided by sophisticated spyware and shadowy collaborations with social media platforms. In a nation where a hashtag can become a death sentence, al-Jasser’s fate was sealed when the state accused him of running anonymous accounts that criticized the royal family.
Global reaction has ranged from diplomatic hand-wringing to blunt outrage. Human rights groups condemned the execution as an assault on free expression and a grotesque escalation of the kingdom’s crackdown on journalists and critics. The Saudi state, as ever, brushed off the criticism, defending the sentence as a lawful response to “destabilizing” activities—code for anything that dares to challenge the crown’s monopoly on truth.
The chilling message is unmistakable: Saudi Arabia’s new model of information control is both medieval and modern. The execution of a journalist for tweets and digital reporting is designed to sow terror among the digitally active, serving as a reminder that, for all its futuristic cityscapes and Vision 2030 promises, the kingdom remains a place where dissent—online or offline—can be fatal.
In this era of digital authoritarianism, Saudi Arabia is writing the manual. With each execution, it signals to its people and the world that the internet, like the press, is only as free as the king allows. For those tempted to speak out, the lesson of Turki al-Jasser will echo: in the kingdom of hashtags, the sword is just a click away.