Saudi Arabians are using a widely available Google and Apple store app to report activists who speak out against the government. Some have received harsh sentences while others are self-censoring.

• Saudi Arabian citizens are reporting activists that speak out against the government on the Kollona Amn app.
• In August, an academic who was reported on Kollona Amn was sentenced to over 30 years in prison.

For "Real," a Saudi Arabian women's-rights activist, anonymity is all that keeps her safe. Under that alias, she uses Twitter to advocate for victims of domestic violence in the kingdom, sending their stories trending in the country and overseas. Her work is fraught with risk.

"Every day we wake up to hear news, somebody has been arrested, or somebody has been taken," Real told Insider, using a voice modulator to disguise her voice. "Today I'm here with you, sharing my story. Tomorrow I might be caught."

Real, like other activists, is on edge after the price of speaking out online in Saudi Arabia was made clear this August. The academic Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani was accused of "using the internet to tear Saudi Arabia's social fabric" and sentenced to 45 years in prison. On August 16, Salma el-Shabab, a Ph.D. student, was sentenced to 34 years in jail for a handful of tweets in support of activists and members of the kingdom's political opposition in exile.

El-Shabab was reported to the authorities via Kollona Amn, a mobile app available to download from the Apple App store and the Google Play store, which empowers ordinary citizens to snitch on their compatriots.

The Saudi regime has often encouraged citizens to inform on one another, but Kollona Amn, launched by the Saudi interior ministry in 2017, has made it possible to report comments critical of the regime or behavior deemed offensive by the conservative theocracy with a few clicks. Legal-rights activists say that over the past few years, they've witnessed a dramatic rise in court cases that reference the app, as the country's current leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan — widely known by his acronym MBS — expands the use of technology to surveil, intimidate, and control its citizens at home and abroad.

Noura Aljizawi, a researcher at the Citizen Lab, an institution that investigates digital threats to free expression, told Insider that Kollona Amn encourages everyday citizens to play the role of police and become active participants in their own repression. Putting the state's eyes everywhere also creates a pervasive sense of uncertainty — there is always a potential informant in the room or following your social-media accounts. "It's very concerning. When people start losing trust, they oppress each other," she said.

Saudi activists that Insider spoke to said they felt that some people use Kollona Amn defensively. If they overhear something that could be perceived as dissent, they inform on colleagues or contacts to distance themselves from dangerous views, in case someone else also informs. In other cases, the app has been used to settle personal scores or for blackmail.

Apple and Google both have policies restricting apps that carry a risk of physical harm, harassment, and discrimination. Neither company responded to a request for comment. This year, Google will open two new offices in Saudi Arabia and is working on a controversial data partnership with the state oil company, Saudi Aramco. Despite the company's assurances, activists said that they don't trust Google to safeguard their data, and they assume that government apps — of which there are dozens on the Play Store — contain backdoors or other ways to collect data.

"Most people I know in Saudi have two phones," Wajeeh Lion, a prominent LGBTQ activist from Saudi Arabia, who now lives in exile in the US, told Insider. "One that has the government apps and another that has all of the other apps." Real, the women's-rights activist, uses three phones.

The implications of being informed on are serious. In May last year, Lina Al-Sharif, a doctor who had advocated for human rights in Saudi Arabia on Twitter, was detained by authorities on unknown charges. People who know her told Insider that someone had tried to blackmail her before her arrest, threatening to report her on Kollona Amn. In August 2021, a blogger named Tala Safwan was arrested, having been accused of insulting Islam. Safwan was apparently reported online after a TikTok video of her talking to a female friend, in what some viewers interpreted as a sexually suggestive manner, was widely shared. Going viral is a relatively common route to jail.

"If your case becomes a matter of public opinion, then it's more likely that you will get in deep trouble," Lion said.

LGBTQ people are often targets. In 2019, Suhail Yousef AlYahya was sentenced to three years in jail for "public decency offenses" and cybercrimes, after posting photos of himself in a bathing suit.

Abdullah Alaoudh, the research director at Democracy for the Middle East Now, an advocacy group, said the aim of Kollona Amn is to push Saudis to censor themselves online, and to increase the risk of organizing any political or social movements. "You always fear that it's just at the tip of anybody's finger to report you," he said.

This paranoia about political opposition is also the root of the state's desire to crack down on political speech or social activism on Twitter, which has 2.4 million registered users in the kingdom, and is a rare space for free expression.

"We don't have political representatives in the country. We don't have any kind of political life. So Twitter really is our parliament," Aljizawi said.

Aljizawi said that Salma el-Shabab's case shows that the Saudi government continues to use technology to pursue its critics across borders. The tweets that led to el-Shabab's arrest were written while she was in the UK; she was arrested as soon as she returned to Saudi Arabia.

In 2018, the Saudi government used the Pegasus app to spy on the slain Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi while he was in the United States and Turkey. Earlier this year, a former Twitter employee was found guilty of helping the Saudi government spy on citizens using the platform.

"It's terrifying," Aljizawi said. "It's just an example of how these regimes will absolutely deploy and utilize all kinds of technologies and means to exploit the cybersphere to expand their repression."