Snap axes Al Jazeera Snapchat Discover Publisher channel in Saudi Arabia

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Snapchat co-founders Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), March 2, 2017 in New York City.

Snap has been asked by the Saudi Arabia government to remove the Al Jazeera Discover Publisher Channel in that country because it violated local laws, the social media company said on Sunday.

“We make an effort to comply with local laws in the countries where we operate,” a Snapchat spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters late Sunday.

Al Jazeera is a state funded media company from Qatar. Saudi Arabia led a group of other nations in the region to cut ties with Doha earlier this year, and one of the specific complaints about Qatar from those countries has been its use of Al Jazeera.

The decision to remove the channel was reported earlier on Sunday in the Wall Street Journal.

The conflict is the latest example of a technology company being pinned in the crosshairs of geopolitics as it navigates censorship of content on its platforms, the Wall Street Journal
reported.

—CNBC contributed to this report.