'Shameless' influencers face backlash for promoting Saudi Arabia music festival

Celebrities criticised for posting about a ‘cultural revolution’ in country without mentioning human rights record

Alyx Gorman
@AlyxG
Mon 23 Dec 2019 03.28 GMT
Last modified on Mon 23 Dec 2019 03.38 GMT

MDL Beast had all the markings of a big budget electronic music festival. The line-up included big name acts like David Guetta and Steve Aoki. The guest list featured supermodels (Joan Smalls and Alessandro Ambrosio) and actors (Armie Hammer and Ed Westwick), and there was plenty of fluorescent face paint and neon lights.

But the event was not held in the California or the Nevada desert. Instead, MDL Beast was located in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The festival, which took place over the weekend, billed itself as “the region’s biggest music event”. Now many of its high profile attendees are being accused of engaging in “image rehab” for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

It is not the first time western celebrities and influencers have been criticised for promoting Saudi Arabia as a tourist destination. In September, the kingdom announced it would open itself to foreign tourism. In addition to offering tourist visas, the government enacted policy changes to make the region more appealing to tourists, including allowing unmarried foreign couples to book hotel rooms together, and allowing solo female travellers to rent hotel rooms.

Following these changes a number of influencers, with follower numbers in the hundreds of thousands, accepted paid-for press trips to the kingdom, and posted fawning commentary on social media.

The biggest-name attendees at MDLBeast have follower counts in the millions. While many documented their experience at the festival on social media, mentions of the kingdom’s human rights record were noticeably absent.

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