It kind oflooked like Coachella.
This past weekend,????? ????? influencers, actors, and models accepted paid-for trips to Saudi Arabia, in exchange for which they posted from a music festival, MDL Beast, and tagged their photos in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It may sound like a pretty standard influencer transaction, but not when you consider that the United Nations called the Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen "the world's worst humanitarian crisis," or really any other aspect of the country's human rights record.
The latest event was part of a public relations campaign attempting to exhibit Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's reformation efforts in the kingdom. In the past, Instagram influencers have been hired to rehabilitate Saudi Arabia's image by promoting changes in the kingdom's tourism policy.
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But the celebrities' decisions to attend this event are particularly poorly timed. After all, this is happening a little over a year after Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. And even amidst some historic changes, like the lift on a long-standing ban on women driving, the conservative kingdom maintains a dismal human rights record.
In 2019, Freedom House, a nonprofit that annually releases a "Freedom in the World" report analyzing every country's political rights and civil liberties, gave Saudi Arabia a seven out of 100, calling the kingdom "not free." The ranking puts Saudi Arabia among the least free countries in the world.
That didn't stop the big names at the event — including actors Armie Hammer and Ryan Phillippe and former Victoria's Secret model Alessandra Ambrosio — from posting pictures, one of which from Hammer claimed a "cultural revolution" was underway in Saudi Arabia.
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People online were not impressed. Plenty of their followers called them out in the comments and on Twitter.
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Topics Social Good Politics Celebrities