Riyadh Life

About

Riyadh Life is a hashtag associated with various videos and photographs highlighting casual aspects of everyday life in the capital city of Saudi Arabia that are lesser known in the Western world.

Origin

On April 17th, 2015, a custom multimedia feed titled “Riyadh Life” emerged on Snapchat’s “Our Story” section, which curated a variety of short video clips and photographs highlighting rare glimpses of vibrant and modern life in Saudi Arabia. While the original image and video submissions featured on Snapchat subsequently faded into ephemera (as intended by the design of the app), many notable examples were soon reposted on other social media sharing sites, most notably on Twitter and YouTube. On April 19th, YouTuber English with Dan uploaded a compilation video titled “Snapchat Story | Riyadh life” (shown below).

Spread

That same day, a collection of notable examples from Snapchat’s “Riyadh Life” feed were reported on by social media strategist and blogger Jesse Wojdylo, along with several screenshots of videos that had been since rendered inaccessible, as well as on the English-language Saudi Arabian travel guide site Destination Riyadh. On April 20th, The Washington Post^[2] became the first major English-language news publication to cover the trending hashtag on Twitter, which described the phenomenon as a social media initiative to counter various negative preconceptions about the oil-rich kingdom in the Western hemisphere. On the following day, #RiyadhLife was also picked up by Saudi Arabia’s English-language news site Arab News^[3] and the UK news publication The Independent.^[4] According to Topsy^[9], #RiyadhLife has been mentioned over 130,000 times on Twitter^[10] within the first week of its appearance on Snapchat.

Notable Examples

External References