Geoblocked in the UAE: How Abu Dhabi is using X to erase unfavorable coverage under the banner of protecting the state's image

By Dima Samaro, Executive Director at Skyline International for Human Rights (SIHR)
 

On April 15, 2026, hundreds of users on X (formerly Twitter) posted that they had received the same notice from the platform's legal team. Signed "X Support," it informed them that X had received an order from the UAE's Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority and that their accounts had been withheld inside the country "in order to comply with X's obligations under the United Arab Emirates's local laws." The accounts remained available elsewhere. Inside the UAE, they were gone.

Attached to many of the notices was a four-page decision from the UAE Federal Public Prosecution, dated March 31, 2026, numbered AGO/2026/0291. The decision orders the blocking and suspension of accounts on X, citing the 2021 Crimes and Penalties Law and the 2021 Anti-Rumours and Cybercrimes Law. It accuses the account holders of "exceeding the limits of freedom of expression," forming "images of hate speech and sedition," and circulating "misleading and tendentious information that affects public opinion and harms the reputation of the state." It instructs the relevant authorities to coordinate with X directly to enforce the order.

Among the affected accounts we have monitored are Gamal Sultan, editor-in-chief of Al Masryeen newspaper, and Osama Gaweesh, editor-in-chief of Egypt Watch, both Egyptian journalists working in exile. The list also includes Ahmed Alshalfi, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Yemen, and Marc Owen Jones, associate professor at Northwestern University in Qatar and a researcher in disinformation. It reaches Saudi-run pages such as Saudi Arabia News and Saudi Breaking News; the Yemeni journalist Anes Mansory, former media adviser to the Yemeni Foreign Ministry; and open-source accounts tracking the Iranian attacks on the Gulf in near real time, including Roaa War Studies, Rassd, Misbar, Asharq Business, Middle East Events, and segments of Al Arabiya's output. Beyond the region, the same decision landed on Visegrád 24, BRICS News, and Clash Report, large English-language aggregator accounts whose feeds carried footage of the strikes that Abu Dhabi would rather its residents not see. Some were geoblocked inside the UAE only. Others were suspended from X globally. Hundreds more have been named, and the list is still growing.

A decision written in the language of reputation

Decision AGO/2026/0291 is worth reading closely because the Public Prosecution has been unusually candid about what it is trying to achieve. The operative grievances, laid out in the decision itself, are that the affected accounts published content that affects "public opinion," harms "the reputation of the state," incites "sedition," and follows a "coordinated pattern" of posting and hashtag use suggestive of a "systematic targeting of the state." It then concludes that these acts "constitute crimes punishable by law" and orders their suppression.

None of those grievances describes a crime as international human rights law understands the term. Article 19(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights permits restrictions on expression only where they are provided by law, necessary, and proportionate to protect the rights of others, national security, public order, public health, or morals. "Reputation of the state" is not on that list. "Affecting public opinion" is not on that list. The UN Human Rights Committee's General Comment No. 34 is explicit on the point, stating that laws penalizing expression of opinion about historical facts or protecting the honor of public institutions and symbols are incompatible with the Covenant. What AGO/2026/0291 does, in effect, is treat the editorial independence of journalists, the analytical work of academics, and the aggregation of publicly available footage as threats to state prestige and then criminalize them.

X's compliance, and the Dubai office in the room

X did not have to comply with AGO/2026/0291 the way it did. Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and under X's own country withheld content policy, the company is expected to evaluate government demands against international human rights standards, push back on those that are overbroad, narrow compliance where possible, notify affected users meaningfully, and publish the legal basis on which it acted. On the available evidence, X did none of this with rigor.

The readiness of that compliance cannot be separated from the company's commercial footprint in the UAE. X opened its Middle East and North Africa headquarters in Dubai Internet City in 2021 and has maintained the office since. Staff based there are subject to UAE law, including the very cybercrime and rumor laws cited in the decision, and the Prosecution's document assumes as much, instructing enforcement "in coordination with the relevant authorities at the platform." When a platform's regional staff are physically and legally exposed to the jurisdiction they are expected to push back against, due diligence collapses into whatever the host government is willing to accept. Local compliance stops being a safeguard and becomes a delivery mechanism.

The war context

The March 31 decision did not appear out of nowhere. Since February 28, 2026, when Iran launched its missile and drone response to the joint US and Israeli strikes, the UAE has been under sustained attack, with intercepted debris landing on residential towers in Abu Dhabi, on port facilities in Fujairah and Jebel Ali, and on industrial zones in Dubai. The Ministry of Defense puts the death toll at thirteen and the wounded at more than two hundred. It has been the most serious security event in the country's modern history, and it has also been, for Abu Dhabi, an image crisis. A country whose economic model rests on being seen as the safest and most stable corner of the Middle East cannot easily accommodate a timeline full of fires at its ports and interceptor contrails over its skyline.

The response has run on two tracks. On one, mass arrests. By early April, Abu Dhabi Police had announced the detention of 375 people for filming and sharing footage of the strikes, drawn from across the expatriate population. The Attorney General ordered the expedited trial of 35 of them, facing minimum penalties of one year in prison, a AED 100,000 fine, and deportation for foreign nationals. Cases documented by Bellingcat, CBS News, and Reporters Without Borders include a Filipina domestic worker arrested for taking a photo near the Burj Al Arab, a Vietnamese sailor detained in Fujairah for filming from his vessel while still in international waters, and a 60-year-old British tourist charged after deleting, at police request, a clip of a missile passing overhead.

On the other, AGO/2026/0291. Where the police cannot reach, because the poster is a Qatar-based academic or a London-based editor, the geoblock reaches instead, and where the geoblock is not enough, a quiet request to X's legal team escalates to a full global suspension. In the same window, the chair of the UAE National Media Office urged citizens to deal cautiously with content on social media and declared that "protecting society from social media falls within the state's priorities." The two tracks are one policy. The UAE is using a genuine national emergency to normalize a permanent regime of content control.

What the authorities wanted in the feed instead tells its own story. Through March and April, Emirati and expatriate influencers, lifestyle bloggers, real estate accounts, and tourism pages flooded the platforms with posts assuring followers that "the UAE is safe" and that "Dubai is open for business." Government media offices publicly thanked them for responsible messaging, and hashtags praising air defense performance and national resilience trended for days. A balcony video of an intercept was a crime. A post telling the world that nothing was really happening was a public service.

What geoblocking means for the right to information

Geoblocking is the practice of using a user's IP address, SIM card, or device signals to decide what content they are allowed to see. When a platform geoblocks an account at a government's request, the user inside the country loses access to information they are entitled to receive, and the account holder outside the country loses the audience they are entitled to reach. Neither is given a hearing. Neither is told the specific posts at issue. Neither has a route of meaningful appeal.

When deployed at a government's request to silence journalists and researchers, geoblocking is censorship. The fact that it leaves the account technically alive, the fact that it is executed by a tech company rather than a state censor, and the fact that the user outside the country can still see the content, do not change the character of what is being done to the user inside the country. They are being prevented by state order from accessing speech they have a right to receive. That is censorship, and calling it "content withholding" or "local compliance" does not make it something else.

For the roughly 11 million people living inside the UAE, most of them migrant workers without citizenship or political voice, the practical effect of AGO/2026/0291 is that an entire register of reporting about the country they live in has been removed from the platform they use to stay informed of what’s happening on the ground. The right to seek, receive, and impart information, protected by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration and Article 19 of the ICCPR, is the precondition for every other right. The right to participate in public affairs, protected by Article 25 of the ICCPR, requires access to a plural information environment. The right to an effective remedy, protected by Article 2, requires that restrictions on speech be reviewable.

AGO/2026/0291 was drafted in secret, applied without notice, and issued by a body whose decisions are not meaningfully reviewable in any forum accessible to the people it affects. The chilling effect extends well past the accounts on the list, because every journalist, researcher, and open-source investigator working on the UAE now knows that verified reporting of publicly observable events is grounds for erasure. Geoblocking at this scale is a governance tool.

The VPN trap

The obvious response to a geoblock is a VPN, and UAE residents know it. According to the Cybernews VPN Adoption Report, more than 9.6 million VPN apps were downloaded inside the UAE in 2025, giving the country the highest per-capita VPN adoption rate in the world at 85.5 percent. The figure describes a population that long ago concluded the version of the internet on offer inside the UAE is not the whole internet.

The authorities have closed the loop. Under the Federal Decree-Law No. 34 of 2021 on combating rumors and cybercrimes, the same instrument cited in AGO/2026/0291, it is a serious offense to use a VPN for what the law calls "illegal purposes," including concealing one's IP address to access websites, calling apps, or gaming platforms blocked by the UAE government or to commit or cover up any other offense. Violators face imprisonment and fines ranging from AED 500,000 to AED 2 million, between roughly USD 136,000 and USD 545,000. Read together with the prosecution's decision, the effect is a closed system. The state orders X to hide an account from UAE users, and any UAE user who tries to go around the hiding can be prosecuted for the tool they used to do it. The right to receive information has been criminalized at both ends.

The way out of the grey box

The decision that arrived in hundreds of inboxes will not be the last of its kind. The UAE has established a template, and that template is being watched closely by every government in the region that has ever wanted a journalist silenced without the inconvenience of having to silence them openly. Whether it hardens into regional practice depends, in large part, on whether the platform enforcing it is willing to accept that role.

The pressure on X has to start with transparency. A four-page decision that reshapes what eleven million people are allowed to see on one of the world's largest information platforms cannot remain a document circulated privately between a government legal office and a company legal office. The full text of AGO/2026/0291, any accompanying requests from the UAE authorities, and a complete breakdown of which accounts were geoblocked inside the country and which were suspended globally should be on the public record, and they should be there now.

The twice-yearly aggregate transparency reports X publishes are not a substitute for account-level disclosure on a case of this scale and political sensitivity. Equally, any account suspended globally on the basis of this decision should be restored unless X can show, with specificity and in public, that the suspension rested on a violation of the platform's own policies independent of the UAE demand. Carrying a UAE content ruling beyond the UAE's borders is a separate failure from complying with it at the border, and it is the one we are most concerned about.

The problem does not stop with the platform. The UAE's 2021 cybercrime and rumors laws, which treat affecting public opinion, harming the reputation of the state, and publishing misleading information as criminal acts and which extend that criminalization to the use of a VPN, are not compatible with any serious reading of international human rights standards. They cannot be fixed with better enforcement or more careful prosecutorial discretion. They need to go, and the hundreds of people currently facing prison time under them need to go home.

Finally, the governments that host X's corporate entities and that treat the UAE as a strategic partner have their own question to answer. Their residents and citizens, the journalists in exile, the academics on faculty at their universities, and the aggregator accounts operated from inside their borders are being silenced on a major platform at the request of a foreign government, under foreign laws, without any domestic legal review. Silence from these capitals is its own kind of answer.

Geoblocking works because it is quiet. It leaves no physical trace. It does not knock on anyone's door. It produces a small grey box where a voice used to be, and then it moves on. The work of those of us outside the grey box is to keep describing what is inside it and to keep naming the governments and companies that put it there.