Twitter lets Saudi official and MBS aide Bader al-Asaker keep his verified account with 2.1M followers, despite being implicated in a plot to recruit employees
Saudi official Bader al-Asaker accused by US of recruiting employees to secretly report on dissidents' anonymous accounts
Context & Ripple Effects
This story is the latest beat in a four-year arc of Saudi espionage running through Twitter's own workforce. Reporting in 2018 revealed Saudis had groomed a Twitter employee to spy on dissident accounts before Western intelligence warnings led to his firing, and the following year the DOJ charged two ex-Twitter employees with spying for the kingdom, one allegedly accessing 6,000 accounts.
What changed with this report is the target: the accused is no longer a rogue insider but Bader al-Asaker himself, an aide to MBS whom US authorities say recruited employees to report on anonymous dissident accounts — and Twitter has declined to strip his verified status or his 2.1M-follower reach. That inaction feeds directly into the RICO lawsuit a jailed dissident's sister later filed, which argues repeated security failures let staff expose thousands of identities to Saudi agents.
First-order effects
- Bader al-Asaker retains a verified account and 2.1M followers on the same platform whose employees were allegedly recruited through the scheme US authorities attribute to him, while dissidents who relied on anonymity there remain exposed.
Second-order effects
- Twitter's refusal to act on a named, US-accused recruiter strengthens the legal case pattern behind the dissident family's RICO suit, which treats the company's security lapses as actionable negligence rather than isolated incidents.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, state-directed recruitment of platform insiders shifts from an internal HR matter (firings after intelligence warnings) to an external legal-enforcement problem, with lawsuits like the RICO case setting a template for holding platforms liable for espionage conducted through their own staff.
The trend: Platform accountability for state-orchestrated surveillance is migrating from quiet internal firings toward public litigation and government charges, with Twitter's own workforce at the center.