Twitter Adds Warning Label, Then Removes, Tweet by Malaysian Prime Minister Saying Muslims Have a ‘Right’ to ‘Kill Millions of French People’
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On Thursday, Twitter added a warning label and then removed a tweet from Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in which he said Muslims had a “right to be angry and kill millions of French people.”
The comment was one in a series of messages in which Mohamad railed against France and French President Emmanuel Macron, written hours after a man yelling “Allahu akbar” killed three women in a French church.
“Macron is not showing that he is civilized,” Mohamed wrote. “He is very primitive in blaming the religion of Islam and Muslims for the killing of the insulting school teacher. It is not in keeping with the teachings of Islam. But irrespective of the religion professed, angry people kill. The French in the course of their history has killed millions of people. Many were Muslims.”
In the message Twitter removed, Mohamad added, “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.”
The platform initially appended a warning label to the message, telling readers, “It may be in the public’s interest for the tweet to remain accessible.” Viewers were required to click a button indicating they still wanted to view the message in order to read it. However, the message was subsequently removed and replaced with a note that the tweet “violated the Twitter rules.”
The action came after outcry from users, particularly conservative users, complained about its presence on the site. The development came a day after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on the rationale undergirding his company’s censorship decisions.
Dorsey has appended warning labels to at least 65 of President Donald Trump’s messages since Twitter began the practice in May. At the same time, Dorsey has refused to add warnings labels to messages from Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei referring to Jews as “cancerous” and calling for Israel to be “eliminated.”
“We did not find those to violate our terms of service, because we considered them saber-rattling, which is part of the speech of world leaders in concert with other countries,” Dorsey told the committee on Wednesday. “Speech against our own people, or our country’s own citizens, we believe is different and can cause more immediate harm.”
