The headquarters of Saudi Aramco (the national oil company) has been smote by an enemy cruise missile/drone. A few months ago the US Navy support activity in Bahrain was hit hard enough to put it out of business.
I know these places and so I looked for photographs of these targets. It is wrong to say there are no images, but there are darn few. Yet I know each and every Saudi has a camera on him at all times. They love to post photos. So I presume photos are being suppressed somehow.
How?
I suppose they make it illegal to publish such photos, and enforce these laws to such an extent that deterrence works. That’s what the UAE has been doing with pictures and videos of Iranian strikes:
I suppose that is part of it. Were I to post a photo I took on my phone to some social media site, could the metadata on the file identify me?
What bothers me about this is that the Internet sort of promised us we could bypass censorship and could know The Truth even if our Overlords wished to hide it. Perhaps that never was really the case, or it least it is no longer the case.
It was probably never entirely true, and now even less so outside of the U.S. and Western Europe, I suspect.
China, for example, is very well-known for censoring the internet: blocking its citizens’ access to many websites, and monitoring and filtering content that it deems objectionable.
The other point is - even without metadata, it is probably not difficult for authorities to use simple detective work to identify the source of photos. You took it on your balcony? The angle of the shot is a giveaway. Who else is in the photo? You were in a sensitive or restricted area? The list is likely small, they may have video surveillance of the area nowadays to narrow down the list of candidates, etc. The resolution of the photo may be a clue to the camera/phone type. There are plenty of places where your rights are not as clear as in America, so they can decree “no photos” and the investigation is easier once they have a list and can interrogate. Even without Gestapo level tactics, people in the Gulf states are likely enjoying cushy ex-pat jobs and won’t want to rock the boat.
The Gulf states are using the logic “we don’t want to tell the Iranians how good their aim was” and similar national security concerns, plus avoiding public embarassment. Even Israel - I saw the occasional “missile strike” video but very little in the media, and it was public knowledge that Israel did not want the results put online also for “national security” purposes, to hide how effective or well aimed some attacks were. The USA similarly has released very little about the attacks on their bases - I’m surprised we haven’t seen a witch hunt for the people who released some of those photos of the bases.
I was surprised to see the video from the Saudi airport; I assume that went online too fast, before they could clamp down on media posts, since I haven’t seen a lot more since.