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Yet government manipulation of social media has been repressed in other authoritarian states in recent years, said Alexei Abrahams, research fellow at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab.
Even for conversations involving millions of tweets, a few hundred or a few thousand influential accounts feed the discussion, he said, citing new research. The Saudi government seems to have realized this and tried to take control of the conversation, he added.
"From the point of view of the regime," he said, "if there are only a few thousand accounts that fuel the speech, you can simply buy or threaten the activists, and that influences considerably the conversation. "
While the Saudi government was trying to rethink its image, it followed closely how some of its most controversial decisions had been received and how the country's most influential citizens had shaped these perceptions.
After the country announced economic austerity measures in 2015 to offset low oil prices and curb the growing fiscal gap, McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, measured the reception of these policies by the public.
In a nine-page report, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, McKinsey revealed that the measures had twice as much coverage on Twitter as on the country's traditional media or blogs, and that the negative sentiment was 39, largely outweighed the positive reactions on social media.
The firm found that three people were leading the conversation on Twitter: the writer Khalid al-Alkami; Mr. Abdulaziz, the young dissident living in Canada; and an anonymous user who went through Ahmad.
After the publication of the report, Mr. Alkami was arrested, said the human rights group ALQST. Abdulaziz said that Saudi government officials had imprisoned two of his brothers and hacked his mobile phone, provided by a Citizen Lab researcher. Ahmad, the anonymous account, was closed.
