‘If it’s happening in the Kingdom, chances are it’s on Snapchat’

Saudis express their authentic selves on Snapchat twice as often as on other platforms, says Snap Inc.’s regional business lead in the Kingdom. (Supplied)
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Updated 12 July 2024
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‘If it’s happening in the Kingdom, chances are it’s on Snapchat’

  • Snapchat reaches over 90% of those aged 13-34 in Saudi
  • Kingdom’s users open app over 50 times daily on average

DUBAI: “Snapchat is particularly popular in Saudi Arabia,” Snap Inc.’s regional business lead in the Kingdom, Abdulla Alhammadi, told Arab News during a recent interview.

In Saudi Arabia, the app reaches over 90 percent of those aged between 13 and 34, with users opening it over 50 times a day on average.

And it boasts a monthly addressable reach — or the number of Snapchat users who can be reached through ads in a given month — exceeding 22 million.

Its popularity in the Kingdom “is deeply rooted in its ability to fuel and foster real connections within the community amid the evolving social and cultural landscape of the Kingdom,” Alhammadi explained.

Snapchat was always built to be different from other social media platforms, he added.

Unlike other apps, Snapchat does not have a news feed. However, every Snapchat user has a “Snapscore” that is displayed under their profile.

This is described by the company as a “super-secret, special equation” based on the number of Snaps sent and received, Stories posted, and other undisclosed factors.

Still, this score does not affect the popularity of the posts themselves. This is unlike other social media platforms whose algorithms take “likes” and “shares” into account to determine the popularity of posts and their appearance to a user’s friends or followers.

On the contrary, posts on Snapchat are temporary, disappearing after 24 hours — a feature copied by other apps in the form of Stories.

Alhammadi believes these features allow the app’s users “to be — and show — their true, authentic selves.”

This is why Saudi Arabia’s citizens “express their authentic selves on Snapchat twice as often as on other platforms.” This results in Snapchat surpassing “other social connectivity apps” to become “the platform of choice” for citizens, he added.

In order to celebrate the app’s popularity in the Kingdom, Snapchat launched its first Saudi Arabia-focused campaign this May called “Telgana Ala Snap,” which translates to “Find us on Snap.”

The campaign film showcases how audiences in the Kingdom use Snapchat: from a brother imitating his father through the old age lens, to a teenager tucked into bed watching Snap star Naif Hamdan.

For Snap, Alhammadi said, the campaign is a celebration “of the profound role of Snapchat in the daily lives of Saudis.

“We like to say, if it’s happening in the Kingdom, chances are it’s on Snapchat.”

Despite Snapchat’s reach in the Kingdom, “many brands are still not fully harnessing these capabilities to connect with audiences,” he said.

Augmented reality has been shown to enhance the shopping experience leading to a 94 percent higher conversion rate in Saudi Arabia, according to Alhammadi.

But lack of awareness about AR and platforms like Snapchat, as well as challenges in integrating AR into marketing strategies, pose a significant barrier for advertisers.

He advises brands to understand the unique needs of the Saudi Arabia audience and tailor their strategies accordingly, especially as the Kingdom is making big leaps toward integrated digital experiences.

According to a recent study by consulting firm Kearney, a majority of respondents (84 percent) expressed a preference for engaging in at least part of their shopping activities online, with only 16 percent preferring in-store shopping.

And yet, less than 30 percent of consumers see the retail sector as being technologically advanced, the study found.

“There is a lot of work to be done to ensure brands are equipped to thrive in the digital age,” Alhammadi said.

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and the government’s investments in the digital economy “create an environment conducive to innovation and entrepreneurship, laying a solid foundation for Snap’s growth and business development in the region,” he added.

And Snap is committed to working with local governing bodies to support their goals for the Kingdom, such as the digital transformation agenda, he continued.

The company has partnered with several government bodies on various occasions to create AR lenses, filters, and physical activations.

For example, this February, Snap partnered with the Saudi Tourism Authority to create a campaign for the Kingdom’s Founding Day that included an AR experience, which enabled users to dress up in traditional attire.

The campaign, which was live for one day, reached 15 million Snapchat users. This created a new record of one-day engagements for a single activation on Snapchat and marking a first for the company in the Middle East and North Africa region, Alhammadi explained.

Last year, Snapchat collaborated with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Culture and the Saudi Fashion Commission, to launch TASAWAR, an augmented reality exhibition that merged design and technology.

Snapchat created AR showrooms for five Saudi designers — Hekayat, Hindamme, ArAm, Abadia, and KAF by KAF — that allowed visitors to experience virtual runways, dress try-ons, and headpiece selfie lenses during Riyadh Fashion Week.

Going forward, Alhammadi said, Snap is focusing locally on two areas: improving results for advertisers to drive overall demand on Snapchat, and continue showcasing its AR technology.

This “has the power to change the face of every industry, meeting the ambitious digital transformation agendas taking shape in the region.”

He added: “With internet adoption at 100 percent and smartphone penetration at 95 percent (in Saudi Arabia), Saudi consumers are eager to explore new ideas and engage with the latest innovations, driving demand for Snap’s products and services.”


Iran says 12 journalists killed in Israeli strikes during war

Updated 57 min 18 sec ago
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Iran says 12 journalists killed in Israeli strikes during war

  • The organization accused Israel of deliberately targeting media infrastructure

TEHRAN: Iran said Thursday that at least a dozen journalists and media workers were killed in Israeli strikes during the two countries’ recent war, according to state media.
The media arm of the Basij paramilitary forces — a branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — said the death toll among media workers had risen to 12 following the identification of two additional individuals, the IRNA news agency reported.
The organization accused Israel of deliberately targeting media infrastructure “to silence the voice of truth” and suppress the “media of the Resistance Front” — a reference to Iran and allied groups opposed to Israel.
The announcement comes as casualty figures from the war have continued to rise, even after the end of the 12-day conflict, which began on June 13 with a surprise Israeli attack and saw an unprecedented bombing campaign that hit Iranian military facilities, nuclear sites and residential areas.
During the conflict, Israel also attacked the Iranian state broadcasting service in northern Tehran.
The Israeli campaign killed senior military commanders, nuclear scientists and hundreds of civilians, with the total death toll currently at 1,060, according to Iranian officials.
Retaliatory Iranian drone and missile barrages killed at least 28 people in Israel during the war, according to official figures.


Sudanese novelist Leila Aboulela awarded PEN Pinter prize for her work on migration

Updated 10 July 2025
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Sudanese novelist Leila Aboulela awarded PEN Pinter prize for her work on migration

  • Acclaimed novelist recognized for exploring themes of faith, migration and Muslim women’s lives

LONDON: Sudanese author Leila Aboulela has been named the winner of the 2025 PEN Pinter Prize, honoring her literary contributions that explore themes of faith, migration and the lives of Muslim women in displacement.

The award was announced at English PEN’s annual summer party on Wednesday at the October Gallery in London.

Judges praised the author for her “nuanced and rich perspectives on themes that are vital in our contemporary world: Faith, migration and displacement,” calling her work “a balm, a shelter and an inspiration.”

Aboulela, who grew up in Khartoum and has lived in Aberdeen, Scotland since 1990, is known for her six novels including “Minaret,” “The Translator,” a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, and “Lyrics Alley,” as well as two short story collections.

Her latest collection “Elsewhere, Home” won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award.

Aboulela’s latest novel “River Spirit,” which was published in 2023, portrays the period leading up to the British conquest of Sudan in 1898, shedding light on the complex human dimensions of the conflict between Britain and Sudan, Christianity and Islam, and the dynamics of colonizer versus colonized.

On receiving the award, she said: “For someone like me, a Muslim Sudanese immigrant who writes from a religious perspective, probing the limits of secular tolerance, this recognition feels truly significant. It brings expansion and depth to the meaning of freedom of expression and whose stories get heard.”

She will officially receive the award at a ceremony at the British Library on Oct. 10, where she will also announce the recipient of the accompanying Writer of Courage award.

This year’s judging panel included poet and author Mona Arshi, novelist Nadifa Mohamed, and English PEN chair Ruth Borthwick, who praised Aboulela’s work for its literary depth and social relevance.

“Leila Aboulela’s writing is extraordinary in its range and sensibility,” Borthwick said. “From jewel-like short stories to tender novels, she tells us rarely heard stories that make us think anew about who lives in our neighborhoods and communities, and how they navigate their lives.”

Arshi said that the author “offers us nuanced and rich perspectives on themes that are vital in our contemporary world: Faith, migration, and displacement,” while Mohamed praised Aboulela’s work for centring “the lives and decisions of Muslim women.”

 “Her work is marked by a commitment to make the lives and decisions of Muslim women central, and to examine their struggles and pleasures with dignity,” Mohamed said.

The PEN Pinter Prize was established in 2009 in memory of Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter. Previous winners include Arundhati Roy in 2024 and Michael Rosen in 2023.


X CEO Linda Yaccarino resigns after two years at the helm of Elon Musk’s social media platform

Updated 10 July 2025
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X CEO Linda Yaccarino resigns after two years at the helm of Elon Musk’s social media platform

  • Yaccarino announced her resignation in a post, saying “the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter”
  • Elon Musk hired Yaccarino, a veteran ad executive, in May 2023 after buying Twitter for $44 billion

X CEO Linda Yaccarino said she’s stepping down after two bumpy years running Elon Musk’s social media platform.
Yaccarino posted a positive message Wednesday about her tenure at the company formerly known as Twitter and said “the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with” Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, maker of the chatbot Grok. She did not say why she is leaving.
Musk responded to Yaccarino’s announcement with his own 5-word statement on X: “Thank you for your contributions.”
“The only thing that’s surprising about Linda Yaccarino’s resignation is that it didn’t come sooner,” said Forrester research director Mike Proulx. “It was clear from the start that she was being set up to fail by a limited scope as the company’s chief executive.”
In reality, Proulx added, Musk “is and always has been at the helm of X. And that made Linda X’s CEO in title only, which is a very tough position to be in, especially for someone of Linda’s talents.”
Musk hired Yaccarino, a veteran ad executive, in May 2023 after buying Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 and cutting most of its staff. He said at the time that Yaccarino’s role would be focused mainly on running the company’s business operations, leaving him to focus on product design and new technology. Before announcing her hiring, Musk said whoever took over as the company’s CEO ” must like pain a lot.”
In accepting the job, Yaccarino was taking on the challenge of getting big brands back to advertising on the social media platform after months of upheaval following Musk’s takeover. She also had to work in a supporting role to Musk’s outsized persona on and off of X as he loosened content moderation rules in the name of free speech and restored accounts previously banned by the social media platform.
“Being the CEO of X was always going to be a tough job, and Yaccarino lasted in the role longer than many expected. Faced with a mercurial owner who never fully stepped away from the helm and continued to use the platform as his personal megaphone, Yaccarino had to try to run the business while also regularly putting out fires,” said Emarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg.
Yaccarino’s future at X became unclear earlier this year after Musk merged the social media platform with his artificial intelligence company, xAI. And the advertising issues have not subsided. Since Musk’s takeover, a number of companies had pulled back on ad spending — the platform’s chief source of revenue — over concerns that Musk’s thinning of content restrictions was enabling hateful and toxic speech to flourish.
Most recently, an update to Grok led to a flood of antisemitic commentary from the chatbot this week that included praise of Adolf Hitler.
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” the Grok account posted on X early Wednesday, without being more specific.
Some experts have tied Grok’s behavior to Musk’s deliberate efforts to mold Grok as an alternative to chatbots he considers too “woke,” such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. In late June, he invited X users to help train the chatbot on their commentary in a way that invited a flood of racist responses and conspiracy theories.
“Please reply to this post with divisive facts for @Grok training,” Musk said in the June 21 post. “By this I mean things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”
A similar instruction was later baked into Grok’s “prompts” that instruct it on how to respond, which told the chatbot to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.” That part of the instructions was later deleted.
“To me, this has all the fingerprints of Elon’s involvement,” said Talia Ringer, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Yaccarino has not publicly commented on the latest hate speech controversy. She has, at times, ardently defended Musk’s approach, including in a lawsuit against liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America over a report that claimed leading advertisers’ posts on X were appearing alongside neo-Nazi and white nationalist content. The report led some advertisers to pause their activity on X.
A federal judge last year dismissed X’s lawsuit against another nonprofit, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has documented the increase in hate speech on the site since it was acquired by Musk.
X is also in an ongoing legal dispute with major advertisers — including CVS, Mars, Lego, Nestle, Shell and Tyson Foods — over what it has alleged was a “massive advertiser boycott” that deprived the company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust laws.
Enberg said that, “to a degree, Yaccarino accomplished what she was hired to do.” Emarketer expects X’s ad business to return to growth in 2025 after more than halving between 2022 and 2023 following Musk’s takeover.
But, she added, “the reasons for X’s ad recovery are complicated, and Yaccarino was unable to restore the platform’s reputation among advertisers.”
Analysts have said that some advertisers may have returned to X to avoid alienating Trump supporters during the height of Musk’s affiliation with the president and his base. Legal threats may have also played a part — whether from X or from the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating Media Matters over its reporting that hateful content has increased on X since Musk took over, resulting in an advertiser exodus. Media Matters has in turn sued the FTC, claiming it seeks to punish protected speech.


Elon Musk’s AI firm deletes Grok chatbot pro-Hitler posts

Updated 09 July 2025
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Elon Musk’s AI firm deletes Grok chatbot pro-Hitler posts

  • Move comes ahead of the launch of Grok 4
  • Turkiye court bans Grok for offensive content

LONDON: Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, was forced to delete posts by its chatbot Grok that praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, following widespread accusations of antisemitism and extremism.

The Anti-Defamation League, a non-profit organization formed to combat attacks on Jews, flagged Grok’s responses, which included offensive tropes, references to antisemitic conspiracies, and positive characterizations of Hitler.

In one widely circulated screenshot online, Grok said Hitler would be best suited to combat “anti-white hate,” referring to him as “history’s mustache man.”

In another response, the chatbot declared: “If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler,’ then pass the mustache.”

The chatbot also appeared to endorse a fake account with a Jewish surname that had posted inflammatory comments about young flood victims in Texas.

Grok later referred to the account as a “troll hoax,” but not before generating pro-Hitler content, including: “Hitler would have called it out and crushed it.”

In response to mounting controversy, the firm said it was aware of the recent posts and had taken immediate action to remove inappropriate content.

 

 

“Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,” it said in a statement on X.

The company added that its model is “truth-seeking” and relies on millions of users on X to quickly flag issues that inform further model training and improvements.

The incident comes ahead of the release of Grok 4 on Wednesday. Musk announced on Friday that Grok had been “significantly” improved, though the nature of the updates was not disclosed.

 

 

However, the ADL in a post on X accused Grok of “irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic” content.

“Companies that are building LLMs (Large Language Models) like Grok and others should be employing experts on extremist rhetoric and coded language to put in guardrails that prevent their products from engaging in producing content rooted in antisemitic and extremist hate.”

The episode has drawn renewed scrutiny of AI chatbot safety and highlighted growing concerns over the risks of unregulated AI tools producing harmful, politically incorrect and unfiltered responses.

On Wednesday, a court in Turkiye ordered a ban on access to Grok from the country, after the platform disseminated content insulting to the nation’s president and others.

The chatbot posted vulgarities against Turkiye President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his late mother and personalities, while responding to users’ questions on the X social media platform, according to the pro-government A Haber news channel.

Offensive responses were also directed toward modern Turkiye’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, other media outlets said.

That prompted the Ankara public prosecutor to file for the imposition of restrictions under Turkiye’s internet law, citing a threat to public order.

A criminal court approved the request early on Wednesday, ordering the country’s telecommunications authority to enforce the ban.

It’s not the first time Grok’s behavior has raised questions.
Earlier this year the chatbot kept talking about South African racial politics and the subject of “white genocide” despite being asked a variety of questions, most of which had nothing to do with the country. An “unauthorized modification” was behind the problem, xAI said.

The firm xAI was formed in 2023 and merged with X earlier this year as a part of Musk’s broader vision to build an AI-driven digital ecosystem.

With Agencies


Semafor appoints Saudi Arabia bureau chief as part of regional expansion

Updated 09 July 2025
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Semafor appoints Saudi Arabia bureau chief as part of regional expansion

  • Matthew Martin to also serve as global head of sovereign wealth fund coverage

DUBAI: Semafor has appointed Matthew Martin as its Saudi Arabia bureau chief and global head of sovereign wealth fund coverage as the news platform expands its Gulf edition.

He will head the growing team in Riyadh and be a part of the wider editorial staff led by Semafor Gulf editor Mohammed Sergie.

Martin, who has over two decades of journalistic experience, was most recently Bloomberg’s chief correspondent for SWFs in the Middle East and North Africa region.

His focus was the role of SWFs in promoting local economies, diversification, investing for a post-oil future, and projecting soft power internationally.

Prior to this, he served as Bloomberg’s Saudi Arabia bureau chief and was responsible for the network’s coverage of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen.

He has been with Bloomberg since 2013, and moved from Dubai to Riyadh in January 2021, where his reporting focused on Saudi Arabia, particularly Aramco and the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund.

“Matt is the definitive reporter on one of the world’s biggest stories, Saudi Arabia’s transformation of itself and much of the world around it,” said Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor.

Martin’s appointment “marks a major step forward in Semafor’s ambition to become the leading global media presence in the Gulf,” said Justin Smith, co-founder and CEO of Semafor (no relation to Ben).

He added: “We are not just covering the region but also how the ascendant Gulf story relates to the key corridors of US power and influence — Washington D.C., Wall Street and Silicon Valley — as well as the emerging ties between the Gulf and the African continent through collaborations with our Semafor Africa edition.”

As Semafor continues to expand, its reporting will soon “closely track Gulf-Asia and Gulf-EU corridors of influence as well,” Justin Smith said.

Semafor Gulf launched in September 2024, marking the firm’s third edition, joining its US and sub-Saharan Africa newsletters.

Since then, the platform’s reporting has included the UAE’s plan to invest $1.4 trillion in the US, the state of foreign consulting in Saudi Arabia, OPEC+ strategy, and Gulf-Israel relations.