Saudi Study on Student Facebook Use

An interesting Saudi study written up on Al-Sharq al-Awsat's English website: some 68% of young Saudi women do not use their real family names on Facebook, while only 4% of males don't use their real name. Also, some 60% of male students polled use a real picture of themselves, compared to only 5% of females. (Others use no picture, or a famous person, or even a male family member.) Read the whole thing; I leave it to the reader to draw conclusions.

The article notes that Internet access has now reached 36% of the Saudi population. For so rich a country that seems strikingly low; perhaps the fact that the Saudi Internet filterers receive between 700 and 1000 requests a day to block websites might have something to do with it. That article of course says the vast majority (93%) of websites blocked are pornographic. It's the other 7% they never clearly explain. (One could also remark that the Saudis may have a very, very broad definition of pornographic.)

It will be interesting to see if the recent decision by ICANN to expand URLs to include non-Western alphabets will increase access; Facebook has long permitted posting in Arabic script, however, and the study linked above found that among university students, 45% of posted comments are in English, 40% in Arabic (script), and 12% in "Anglicized Arabic" (transliteration). By contrast, among secondary school students, 54% of comments are in English, 40% in transliterated Arabic, and only 6% are in Arabic script. That suggests to me that secondary school students don't write very good literary Arabic, compared to their university counterparts. (Transliterated Arabic posts usually are rather colloquial as opposed to formal Arabic.)