DUBAI: A top Saudi Arabia Islamic cleric has lashed out at social media users of the micro-blogging site Twitter, saying in reports published over the weekend that “buying” followers on the site is “sinful.” Scholar Sheikh Abdullah reportedly told Saudi online news site Sabq that it was “a lie and slander" to pay money to companies to create Twitter followers. His comments are in response to other reports that celebrities and religious figures in the ultra-conservative Gulf Kingdom are buying followers to show their prestige on Twitter. He argued that those tactics have created “ghost" Twitter users. Al Arabiya news network had reported earlier in August that a “Saudi man bought thousands of Twitter followers to expose the practice by prominent ‘Tweeters' who wanted to enhance their profiles.” Abdul Rahman al-Kharashi tweeted on July 27 that he was in a “moment of serious thinking about purchasing up to 500,000 followers as some social figures do." The number of Kharashi's followers on Twitter since then reportedly increased from 600 to 183,000. Companies inside the kingdom reportedly charge between $70 and $270 for adding up to 10,000 new followers to a customer's Twitter account, the network reported. The Saqb article also quoted Saudi clinical psychologist Talal Thaqafi saying that “a person who pays money for the sake of increasing the number of followers has a weak and disturbed personality, and is unable to achieve that feat by any other means." In his diagnosis, he added that such kind of person “suffers from a sense of internal void, and by increasing the amount of followers, he or she satisfies such void, and draw attention to him or herself."
