Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to remove Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei from its platform in a January 22 letter.
Greenblatt thanked Dorsey for permanently removing then-President Donald Trump from the platform as well as for removing a Twitter account that appeared to belong to Khamenei (later it was found to be a fake account). But Greenblatt noted that Khamenei has several other accounts that have promoted violence.
“This has included tweets that remain up today demonizing Zionists as ‘enemies of humanity,’ and calling the State of Israel ‘a malignant cancerous tumor… that has to be removed or eradicated,” Greenblatt wrote.
He also noted that Khamenei has repeatedly issued tweets denying the Holocaust, which violate Twitter’s Hateful Conduct policy.
“Given that you have already suspended an American president from your platform earlier this month, and just removed one of Khamenei’s many Twitter accounts for its blatant and threatening violations of Twitter’s policies, that standard must urgently be applied to Khamenei’s panoply of other Twitter accounts, which so clearly pose a danger to physical safety and routinely violate Twitter’s terms of service,” Greenblatt wrote.
We welcome @Twitter suspending 1 of #Iran's Khamenei's accounts. But this is not enough. Khamenei incites hate, violence, Holocaust denial & COVID rumors through his 6+ OTHER accounts. I wrote to @Jack demanding that Twitter apply its rules fairly & suspend all his accounts now. pic.twitter.com/i75idZTMOu
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) January 22, 2021
Twitter has previously stated that Khamenei’s Twitter account has remained on the platform because Khamenei’s tweets are simply “foreign policy saber-rattling.” When Trump’s Twitter account was banned, the platform said in a statement that they did so because Trump’s account posed a “risk of further incitement of violence.”
