NEW YORK (Legal Newsline) – Twitter has defeated a lawsuit brought by a journalist and dissident from Saudi Arabia who was upset his account was suspended.
Ali Al-Ahmed, a political refugee now living in the United States, claimed Saudi people working for Twitter accessed his information to identify him as a critic of the Saudi government.
His lawsuit claimed his most popular account had 36,000 followers and was suspended over its content. Twitter argued it couldn’t be held liable for two employees who were acting on behalf of Saudi Arabia in 2014-15 (the Department of Justice filed criminal complaints against the individuals in 2019).
New York federal judge Valerie Caproni granted Twitter’s motion to dismiss on Aug. 11 because she says she does not have personal jurisdiction over Twitter.
Al-Ahmed conceded that Twitter is a Delaware corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco but argued its second-largest office is in New York.
“But simply having a large office and a substantial number of employees in a forum is not enough to establish general jurisdiction,” Caproni wrote.
Conducting business and advertising in New York weren’t good enough reasons to impose jurisdiction on Twitter either, she ruled.
“Al-Ahmed has failed… to show that his claims arise from Twitter’s business activity in New York,” she wrote.
Similarly rejected was his claim that Twitter’s suspension of his account caused him to lose business opportunities in New York.
“In addition to the lack of specificity in Plaintiff’s allegations, the Court finds the alleged connection between the suspension of the Arabic-language Twitter account and the loss of New York-based business opportunities to be implausible; of the 12 media outlets that Plaintiff mentions, only one — Al Jazeera — appears to cater to an Arabic-speaking audience,” she wrote.
“The remaining outlets, ranging from CNN and Fox News to the Washington Post and the Associated Press, are English-language outlets with English-speaking audiences. Because only Al-Ahmed’s Arabic-language Twitter account, not his English-language Twitter account, was suspended, without any factual allegations to connect the suspension to the loss of New York-based media opportunities, Al-Ahmed has not made anything close to a prima facie showing that the suspension of his Arabic-language account caused him injury in New York.”