Twitter, which booted Trump for election tweets, has not banned pro-Hitler, pro-Holocaust verified accounts
Twitter, which booted Trump for election tweets, has not banned pro-Hitler, pro-Holocaust verified accounts
Twitter has some explaining to do.
Verified Twitter accounts that have called this week for the genocide of the Israeli people have not been removed from the popular social media platform, which seems strange considering the tech giant permanently banned former President Donald Trump in January for less.
“The world today needs a Hitler,” freelance journalist Adeel Raja, whose byline appeared on CNN’s website as recently as Sept. 2020, said Sunday in a note to his more than 80,000 followers.
Raja’s remarks, which he eventually deleted, come amid the recent escalation in hostilities between Israel and Palestine, in which the former has lost an estimated 10 people, including two children, while the latter has lost as many as 192 people, including 58 children.
“What the Jews are doing in Palestine is similar to what Indian Hindus are doing in Occupied Kashmir. Same tactics,” Raja said Sunday in a tweet that is still live.
As of this writing, Raja’s Twitter account is still active.
Earlier, on May 11, Bollywood actress Veena Malik tweeted a fake quote in support of the Palestinian side of the Israel-Gaza conflict.
“I would have killed all the Jews of the world … but I kept some to show the world why I killed them,” Malik said in a since-deleted tweet to her more than 1.2 million followers.
Adolf Hitler, by the way, never said that.
Malik later tweeted a political cartoon showing a hook-nosed Israeli soldier staring into a mirror and seeing a Nazi Wehrmacht soldier staring back.
“The irony of becoming what you once hated the Most,” she tweeted, adding the hashtag, “#IsraelWarCrimes.”
“Netanyahu is a war criminal…!!!” Malik tweeted Saturday.
Like Raja, Malik’s Twitter account is still active.
It seems strange that neither Raja nor Malik has been booted from Twitter, considering Trump was permanently banned in January for tweeting the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future,” Trump tweeted on the morning of Jan. 8, two days after the Capitol riot. “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
He tweeted a little later that same day: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Twitter made the call later that day to pull the plug on the former president’s account.
Trump’s tweet about skipping the inauguration specifically was “further confirmation that the election was not legitimate,” Twitter explained at the time, arguing it considered the former president’s two tweets “encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts.”
The social media company explained:
Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open. However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence.
Twitter’s explanation for banning Trump hinges on the idea that he was uniquely positioned to do harm by virtue of the fact he was a U.S. president.
But if that’s the argument, then how is the Twitter account of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is still active?
Further, if Twitter actually believes Raja’s and Malik’s unambiguous support for genocide against the Israeli people is more defensible than what Trump said in January simply because they are not as powerful as Trump, then doesn’t that play into the idea that the former president was banned not because of what he said but because he said it?
Remember: Twitter maintains it banned Trump for the “what,” not the “who.”
Twitter also argues it didn’t ban Trump for just those two tweets, but for a pattern of offensive rhetoric and reckless behavior. Those two tweets were simply the final straws. Fair enough!
But that doesn’t address the discrepancy in rules enforcement. Where, exactly, does Twitter draw the line insofar as calls to violence are concerned?
If Twitter is in the business of policing users who are seen as inciting violence, then shouldn’t the rules apply to everyone — former presidents, journalists, and actresses alike? If not, why not? Does Twitter use a propriety metric by which it measures whether calls to violence are acceptable/unacceptable? Does it simply consider a verified user who approvingly “quotes” Hitler as less harmful than the president who announces he won’t attend an inauguration?
Perhaps Twitter will say the difference here is Malik and Raja have complied with the platform’s rules by deleting their pro-Hitler tweets. OK, but then the question now becomes: How many warnings does Twitter issue for accounts approvingly quoting Hitler and invoking his name against the Jews? Does Twitter have an unofficial mulligan policy for pro-Holocaust tweets?
Even with all the possible caveats in place (Trump is more powerful, he has a larger platform, they deleted their tweets, etc.), the question remains: If Twitter sees Trump’s post-election behavior as sufficient to earn him a permanent ban, then how does it explain the continued activity of verified accounts cheering genocide and Hitler? Surely, Malik’s and Raja’s straightforward praise of the Holocaust is just as bad, if not many, many times worse than Trump’s cryptic remarks.
