The social network site Facebook has apparently destroyed the “holy” bond of marriage between a Saudi couple, when a woman filed for divorce Saturday after she found her husband allegedly entangled in Facebook relationships. The couple have been married for two years. Her husband neglected his family obligations by spending “too much time” on Facebook, she said. She suspected that his time away from the family was because he was cheating on her. With the help of her friends, the woman spied on her husband's Facebook page and found that all his friends were mostly women who exchanged flattery with him on the wall-to-wall pages, “and maybe more,” she added. There was a great deal of public display of affection, she said. “He was quick to accept friendship invitations from women, and put his ‘Relationship Status' as single,” she said. Now he can change his status to: “My wife is dumping me, all women are welcome again,” she said. The court is looking into the case. There have been other, more serious consequences, to being part of the Facebook networking site in Saudi Arabia. In 2007, a Saudi father murdered his daughter in Riyadh for chatting on Facebook. She was beaten and shot after she was discovered in the middle of an online conversation with a man. Saudi preacher Ali Al-Maliki then emerged as the leading critic of Facebook, claiming the network was corrupting the youth of the nation. “Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending more on their mobile phones and the Internet than they are spending on food,” he told Al-Arabiya. There are about one million active Facebook users in Saudi Arabia, according to a newly released study by O'Reilly Research. This country is in the top 10 of Arab countries with its number of users.
