Twitter executives last month rejected a request by the Israeli government to remove tweets from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calling for the genocide of the Israeli people, claiming in a dazzling letter obtained by The Post that Jewish hatred qualified as “current comments issues.”
The decision comes after the social media giant recently began monitoring President Trump’s tweets, alleging they “glorify violence” and spread misinformation about voting by mail.
In a May 20 letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs Orit Farkash-Hacohen called on the company to uphold its own hate speech policy and remove Khamenei’s anti-Semitic tweets, calling Israel a “cancerous growth” to be “uprooted and destroyed”. . “
“Twitter’s own Hateful Behavior Policy clearly states that a user” cannot promote violence against, or directly attack, or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religious affiliation … or call mass murder, “Farkash-Hacohen wrote to Dorsey.
“However, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is tirelessly abusing his platform by doing exactly that, without any application or repercussion,” he continued.
“For too long he has been allowed to spread calls for physical violence and anti-Semitism on Twitter,” he added.
But in a muffled response, Twitter Vice President of Public Policy Sinéad McSweeney said the hateful rule did not violate his policies.
“World leaders use Twitter to engage in speech among themselves as well as with their constituents,” McSweeney wrote in the June 15 letter obtained by the Post.
“Currently, our policies regarding world leaders state that direct interactions with other public figures, comments on current affairs, or strident foreign policy statements on economic or military matters generally do not violate the Twitter Rules,” he continued.
“Our assessment is that the tweets you have quoted do not violate our policies at this time, and fall into the category of foreign policy that shakes up economic or military issues from our approach to world leaders,” McSweeney wrote.
Twitter’s refusal to remove the Iranian dictator’s tweets has led to “double standards” accusations by Israeli lawmakers after the social media giant recently began restricting President Trump’s tweets, claiming they were misinformation or promoted violence.
In May, Twitter slapped a “public interest notice” in the president’s tweet during the Minneapolis riots about the death of George Floyd in which he warned: “When the looting begins, the shooting begins.”
Twitter masked the tweet, saying that its comment on the riots after Floyd’s death at the hands of police broke a rule against “glorifying violence.”
Several days earlier, the social media giant took the unprecedented step of tagging two Trump tweets as “promoting misinformation” after he claimed that mail ballots are fraudulent.
Repeated surveillance of Trump’s tweets, and, recently, the suspension of his son Donald Trump Jr.’s account, but not the hateful missives from other leaders, including Khamenei, have led to allegations of censorship and political bias.
In a story on Thursday, the Post detailed how a Twitter spokeswoman tried to justify Trump’s censure, but not the leader of a Middle East regime, in a hearing in front of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem.
The Twitter representative said the tweets by the Iranian leader, where he publicly compared Israel to the COVID-19 pandemic and that a virus stopped, amounted to little more than “foreign policy saber rattling.”
“Calling genocide on Twitter is fine, but isn’t it okay to comment on political situations in certain countries?” asked a stunned legislator.
The Post last month revealed how the integrity chief of the Twitter site had a history of incendiary comments against Trump on the platform, including the claim that there were “real Nazis in the White House.”
Khamenei has also promoted holocaust denial on the website, but during the Knesset hearing on Wednesday, Twitter insisted there was nothing they could do about it unless it was “targeted harassment.”
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