The first time I spoke with Zainab al-Khawaja, in a Skype video conversation in late 2011, the Bahraini dissident explained to me that the popularity of her @angryarabiya Twitter feed — which she used to chart the violent suppression of Bahrain’s Arab Spring uprising that year — seemed to have given her a measure of protection from the authorities.

I asked why she had not been immediately arrested at a protest the week before, when she stood defiantly in front of the riot police firing tear gas at other pro-democracy protesters — an image of defiance that went viral and embarrassed the Persian Gulf monarchy, which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Khawaja replied that she had overheard officers being instructed not to detain or beat her. “One officer kept telling the police, ‘Not this one,'” she recalled.

Khawaja was detained and briefly interrogated by a female police officer later that day, before being released. “I think the reason is that I am active, I am known, in the country and internationally, not to a big extent, but I have a big following on Twitter.”

“I wish that every Bahraini was protected the way I am,” she added. “Just because I’ve been speaking out on Twitter and other places doesn’t mean I have have more rights.”

Two weeks later, whatever protection Khawaja’s social media fame might have earned her seemed to evaporate, as she was dragged away and punched on camera by police officers breaking up a small sit-in at a traffic circle outside a mall in the capital, Manama. The incident was captured in a video clip viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, and witnessed by reporters from the New York Times. For good measure, the police also beat the activist who recorded the incident on video and fired tear gas at witnesses in a coffee shop across the street who were not involved in the protest.

Since then, Khawaja — the daughter of the jailed founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja — has been in and out of prison. Her crimes, defined as such by Bahrain’s ruling family, include expressing her opinion about their crackdown on dissent by ripping up a photograph of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa — an act she repeated in court while on trial for doing so at a protest.

After an appeals court confirmed that conviction last October, and sentenced her to a year in jail for insulting the king, she was imprisoned in March and chose to bring her infant son with her.

The dissident’s sister, Maryam, a human rights activist who also uses Twitter to call for democracy and free speech in Bahrain, told my colleague Murtaza Hussain in March that it would take something more than a social media outcry, namely pressure from the U.S., to get her sister released.

It is true, however, that there is something of a feedback loop between social networks and the traditional media when it comes to which cases of injustice U.S. officials get asked about most frequently during briefings or visits to allies like Bahrain.

So on April 7, when Secretary of State John Kerry appeared in Bahrain next to Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, a member of the royal family who serves as the monarchy’s foreign minister, and made a tepid reference to the importance of human rights, David Sanger of the New York Times asked about Khawaja.

Kerry avoided comment on her case, but Bahrain’s foreign minister — who has used Twitter to scold foreign correspondents and second the thoughts of Kim Kardashian — suddenly promised that Khawaja would be released into what sounded like some form of house arrest. “She will be sent to her home and to be with her family and to be … held with her child in a better surrounding,” he said. “So she will be going home. We’re looking forward to that.”

Readers familiar with Bahrain will not be surprised to learn that Khawaja remains in prison today, five weeks later.

Maryam al-Khawaja told The Intercept on Friday that after the foreign ministry released a statement this week saying her sister would be released — citing “the possibility of negative repercussions” for her young son — Zainab “had a meeting with the head of the prison she’s in, who told her that as far as they’re concerned there is no decision for release, and that the sentencing judge agrees.” The head of the prison insisted that officials there “are not obliged to follow through on statements from the foreign ministry.”