Twitter bans Khamenei’s account

(INN) Twitter announced on Friday that it had permanently banned an account connected to the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The ban came shortly after the account posted a photo showing former US President Donald Trump playing golf in the shadow of a giant drone, according to The Associated Press.

The image, posted late Thursday by the account linked to Khamenei, appeared to call for an attack on Trump, with the caption “Revenge is certain” written in Farsi.

In response to a request for comment from AP, a Twitter spokesman said that the tweet had violated the company’s “abusive behavior policy,” and that the account had violated its “manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts,” without elaborating.

The report noted that other accounts thought to be tied to Khamenei’s office remained active.

Twitter has been criticized for allowing Khamenei to make regular use of his account to threaten Israel, the US, and other Western states, while banning accounts of people such as US President Donald Trump out of “fear of continued incitement to violence”.

Earlier this month, Twitter removed a tweet by Khamenei in which he cast doubt on coronavirus vaccines made in the United States and Britain and said they are “untrustworthy”.

Last May, the Iranian Supreme Leader posted a tweet in which he threatened to implement the Nazi “Final Solution” against Israel.

After Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu responded to those threats, Khamenei asserted that, in using the term “Final Solution”, he did not refer to Jews but rather only to the State of Israel.

Khamenei was later at it again, threatening that “the Zionist virus will not last long and the Zionist regime will not survive – and will be destroyed.”