Meta geo-blocks human rights NGOs in Saudi Arabia and UAE on government request

Meta has restricted more than 100 Facebook and Instagram accounts from reaching users in Saudi Arabia and the UAE since March 2026, complying with state requests that cite local cybercrime laws. The targets include ALQST for Human Rights, Democratic Diwan, researcher Abdullah Alaoudh, and defender Yahya Assiri, whose pages now appear unavailable inside those countries. Affected users were notified only that Meta acted on a ‘local legal requirement’ or government request.

A coalition of 12 rights groups, including Access Now and the EFF, argues the takedowns weaponize Meta’s compliance machinery on behalf of regimes that routinely jail people for social media posts. Meta’s own reports flag the offending content as ‘reporting on regional geopolitical conflicts,’ a category that expanded after US and Israeli strikes on Iran in February 2026 prompted Gulf states to tighten information controls. X, by contrast, has so far declined to honor similar Saudi requests against activist accounts.

The signatories want Meta to publish the underlying legal requests and the human rights due diligence it claims to perform, restore the accounts, and disclose the role of its Gulf regional offices in processing the orders. The episode highlights how platform-level geo-blocking has become a low-friction extension of state censorship, with little transparency about the standards companies actually apply before complying.