Twitter intervened Thursday after former Malaysian leader Mahathir Bin Mohamad posted that “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.”
Mr. Bin Mohamad, who ended his second term as Malaysia’s prime minister in March, made the incendiary remark amid a series of social media posts on the platform about recent violence in France.
Twitter at first hid the post behind a warning label that said it violated its policy against glorifying violence but would remain on the platform to best serve the public’s interest.
However, the post ultimately vanished entirely from Twitter later Thursday.
“This tweet has been actioned for violating our glorification of violence policy,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Washington Times.
Twitter rules prohibit users from sharing content that includes violent threats against a person or group of people regardless of its context, according to the social media company.
At least 1,700 other Twitter accounts shared, or retweeted, Mr. Bin Mohamad’s post before it vanished.
Mr. Bin Mohamad, 95, served as prime minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 and again from 2018 to 2020. His verified Twitter profile is followed by roughly 1.3 million other accounts.
He began his series of Twitter posts by reflecting on the recent beheading of a French teacher in a Paris suburb, which President Emmanuel Macron has called a “typical Islamist terrorist attack.”
More recently, three people were stabbed to death Thursday in Nice, France, meanwhile, in an attack the city’s mayor, Christian Estrosi, described as an act of “Islamo-fascism,” Reuters reported.
President Trump similarly had one of his own tweets hidden behind a label in May after Twitter determined the post violated its policy against glorifying violence. It was left online, however.
Reacting to riots that erupted at the time in Minneapolis over the recent police-related death of George Floyd, Mr. Trump tweeted: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
