The Hill News

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg turned 28 this week. When he sat in his dorm room at Harvard eight years ago, cooking up what later became the world’s largest social network, Zuckerberg envisioned a product that would connect friends to one another across the world. He probably never imagined Facebook would become a forum for Saudi clerics to encourage their followers to crush demonstrators’ skulls or beat their wives.

Sadly, that’s what clerics are doing, and only a small taste of what we found during a six-month study of Saudi social media between January 1 and June 30, 2011. With the help of ConStrat, a Washington-based technology and analytics company, we collected and analyzed more than 40,000 social media entries in both English and Arabic.

Despite the clerics’ historical opposition to modern technology, they’re increasingly gravitating towards it. Here are five of the Saudi clerics’ most politically incorrect messages that you (pr! obably) wouldn’t want your religious leaders repeating.

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