Old Social Media Posts Can Lead to Jail in the UAE

If you are traveling to living in the #UAE, and you have a social media account, we advise you to scour through all your old posts, no matter how far back you have to go, and find anything that even remotely appears to be promoting charities that are not registered in the UAE, and delete it.

Possibly as you read this, there are people employed by the Department of Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities (DIAC) scrolling through your #Facebook and #Twitter accounts, past all the selfies, cat videos, and pictures of coffee cups, trying to find any post you may have written or shared that could implicate you in the crime of raising funds for a non-profit that they do not sanction.

Yes, it seems ludicrous, but you could actually be prosecuted for this, even if the post pre-dates the passage of the new UAE Cybercrime laws, and even if the charitable campaign you supported ended a long time ago, and indeed, even if you were not IN the UAE when you supported it; you could still be charged , fined, and jailed.

The UAE does not take a charitable view of promoting charities that do not operate under the auspices of the #DIAC, and as long as any sort of promotional post exists on your social media account, you are liable to be made an example of. So, browse your history and remove any evidence of your unregistered #humanitarian inclinations.

Source: https://plus.google.com/+RadhaStirling/posts/2gG73nQXsMM