The International Press Institute condemned the piracy of the broadcaster's phone on the Al-Jazeera channel, Ghada Owais, and the defamation campaign against her, in a statement issued today on the website of the institute.
The statement added that Al-Jazeera's prominent broadcaster Ghada Owais and her colleague Ola Fares were targeted in what researchers say is a systematic campaign of harassment on the Internet by Saudi accounts on social media, and the phone of Ghada Owais was also hacked.
An analysis by Mark Owen Jones, researcher and professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, found that the campaign - which resulted in more than 25,000 tweets and retweets within just 24 hours - was driven by several prominent Saudi Twitter accounts.
Ghada Owais has recently covered many thorny issues relating to Saudi Arabia, including the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which led to fears that the attacks were in revenge for her reporting.
Barbara Trionevy, Executive Director of the International Press Institute, condemned the harassment campaign.
Ghada Owais told the International Press Institute that she reported the tweets to Twitter, but received a slow response, describing them as permitting the massive publishing of them.
"I have not succumbed to the threats, and I have repeated to myself: Ghada, she must be stronger now," she said by telephone. "This is the price I pay to be a good Arab journalist," she added.
For his part, Owen Jones noted that Saudi Arabia has carried out campaigns of misinformation against its critics on social media in the past, and has used other electronic means as well.
Agnes Calamard, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, also condemned the defamation campaign against Ghada Aweys and Ola Al-Faris. Calmard had led an investigation into the murder of Khashoggi in 2018, and she was also targeted on the Internet.