Main Edition
US
FR
October 28, 2024 - 7:30pm
At a time when people seem increasingly inclined to side with Israel’s enemies, perhaps the worst possible course of action would be to silence them, validate their victim complex, and limit the public’s exposure to their twisted worldview. Elon Musk’s X, though, appeared to at least temporarily suspend the new Hebrew account of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. (As of publishing time, Khamenei’s suspension seems to have been lifted but X has yet to comment.)
The temptation to ban Khamenei is undoubtedly strong. On Sunday, one day after an Israeli air attack on western Iran, Khamenei posted for only the second time on his new Hebrew account, writing: “The Zionist regime made a mistake, and made a mistake in its calculation regarding Iran. We will make him understand what strength, ability, initiative and desire the Iranian nation has”.
Iran is at war with Israel. The country, according to US officials, is actively seeking to assassinate major American political figures in retaliation for Donald Trump’s 2020 drone strike on Qassem Soleimani. One more than one occasion, Khamenei has used X to deny the Holocaust.
But as Elon Musk hammers out X’s speech policies in real time, nearly two years after buying the company, it’s worth drawing a bright red line where world leaders are concerned. As Donald Trump began to surge in 2015, social media companies faced more and more pressure to suppress his posts. This obviously intensified after 6 January, when Meta and Twitter banned the sitting president.
Before, though, Meta and X held to a policy of making specific speech exceptions for world leaders. “After Trump was elected, Facebook and Twitter came out with their policies on posts that they saw as ‘newsworthy’ or of ‘public interest’ — which was pretty much anything the president of the United States (or other world leaders) said on their platforms,” reported Vox reported in 2021. “In October 2019, Twitter again laid out its policies regarding world leaders, including what content was still subject to their terms of service — that is, the exemptions to the world leader exemptions.”
After Trump’s ban, Vox named Jair Bolsonaro and Khamenei as figures who could also face bans. (Khamenei eventually did in the pre-Musk era.) Musk himself discussed Khamenei’s use of the platform on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “We do have a kind of UN exclusion rule,” he explained last year. “You can have, say, the ayatollah who would prefer that Israel not exist, but he’s allowed to go to the UN building in New York. Generally, officials from Iran do go to the UN building, even though they’re a heavily sanctioned country. Similarly, you do want to have the leaders of countries represented on social media. You want to hear what they have to say, even if what they say is terrible.”
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeTotally agree. Sunlight if the best disinfectant. Oops. That sounds a little Trumpian.
It’s true, of course …
They should ban his netflix and Xbox account too
That will teach him
The imams are typical theocratic dictatorship. Let them speak: “A fish is caught by its mouth.”
Good speech is the best answer to bad speech.
In 1945 the poet Ezra Pound was indicted for treason by the US government for the radio broadcasts he made from Italy during the war years between 1941 and 1945, which were transmitted to England and the US among others. The subjects of his broadcasts were quite extreme: anti-semitism, eugenics, anti Roosevelt and Churchill and praise for Hitler and Mussolini. He was eventually incarcerated for 12 years in the St Elizabeth psychiatric hospital.
Should he have been charged with treason? Or should he have been treated like Khamenei?
I read the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Little Green Book once ( different guy I know). It did give an insight into the mindset of Ayatollahs, and it’s quite short. Weirdly fascinating stuff that will make you grateful you’re not a Muslim.
I also had a copy back in the day. Very light reading. As I recall, the late Ayatollah, PBUH, had amazingly clear directives for a lot of …. peculiar behavior choices.