Twitter intensified its bizarre and disjointed program of censorship by taking down a tweet by Iran’s Ayatollah due to its skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccine while continuing to ignore the regime leader’s calls to wipe out Israel.
Twitter Removes Ayatollah’s Tweet that Vaccines are “Untrustworthy”
Twitter removed a tweet posted on Friday by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saying that anti-COVD vaccines produced in Britain and the US are “untrustworthy.”
“Importing vaccines made in the US or the UK is prohibited,” Khamenei posted on Friday on his English-language Twitter account. “They’re completely untrustworthy. It’s not unlikely they would want to contaminate other nations.”
“Given our experience with France’s HIV-tainted blood supplies, French vaccines aren’t trustworthy either,” he added.
Twitter removed the tweet and replaced it with a message that said it was “no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules.”
A spokesperson for Twitter said on Saturday that the tweet “violates… specifically our COVID-19 misleading information policy. The account owner will be required to delete the violative Tweet before regaining access to their account.”
Khamenei’s English-language Twitter account has more than 876,000 followers despite Twitter being banned in Iran.
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Trump Banned But Calls For Death to Israel Permitted
Ironically, Twitter has permanently banned President Trump over “violence risk.” The social media platform was ridiculed for enacting a double-standard biased against the US president. Ajit Pai, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, pointed out the numerous tweets anti-Israel tweets posted by the Ayatollah that were clearly racist and incited violence.
Serious question for @Twitter: Do these tweets from Supreme Leader of Iran @khamenei_ir violate “Twitter Rules about glorifying violence”? pic.twitter.com/oEkCC8UzFV
— Ajit Pai (@AjitPaiFCC) May 29, 2020
In May, Israel’s Minister for Strategic Affairs Orit Farkash-Hacohen called for the company to uphold its own hate speech policy and remove antisemitic tweets from Khamenei calling Israel a “cancerous growth” to be “uprooted and destroyed.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey responded that Khamenei’s posts were acceptable as they constituted “comments on current events.” Twitter’s Vice President of Public Policy Sinéad McSweeney responded that the tweets calling for the genocide of Israel did not violate their guidelines.
“World leaders use Twitter to engage in discourse with each other, as well as their constituents,” McSweeney wrote in the June 15 letter obtained by the New York Post.
“Presently, our policies with regards to world leaders state that direct interactions with fellow public figures, comments on current affairs, or strident statements of foreign policy on economic or military issues are generally not in violation of the Twitter Rules,” she continued.
“Our assessment is that tweets you have cited are not in violation of our policies at this time, and they fall into the category of foreign policy saber-rattling on economic or military issues of our approach to world leaders,” McSweeney wrote.
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