Twitter Bans Suspected Iran Account After Post Threatens Donald Trump

In the image posted by the suspect’s account Thursday night, Trump is shown playing golf in the shadow of a giant drone, with the caption “Revenge is certain” written in Farsi.

In response to a request for comment from The Associated Press, a Twitter spokesperson said the account was bogus and violated the company’s “spam and handling policy”, without elaborating on how it reached that conclusion.

The tweet of the golfer’s drone photo violated the company’s “abusive behavior policy”, the Twitter spokesperson added.

In Iran, the suspect’s account, @khamenei_site, is believed to be linked to the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, because his behavior mirrors that of other accounts identified in state media as linked to his office. He frequently published excerpts from his speeches and other official content.

In this case, the account carried the link to the Khamenei website.

Other accounts linked to Khamenei’s office that did not tweet the photo of the golf drone, including his main account in English, remained active. The photo had also featured prominently on the supreme leader’s website and was retweeted by Khamenei’s main Farsi-language account @ Khamenei-fa, who apparently deleted it after it was posted.

Earlier this month, Facebook and Twitter cut Trump off their platforms for allegedly inciting the assault on the US Capitol, an unprecedented step that underscored the immense power of tech giants to regulate speech on their platforms. Activists soon urged companies to apply their policies equally to other political figures around the world, in order to combat hate speech and content that encourages violence.

The warning in the caption referenced Khamenei’s comments last month before the first anniversary of the US drone attack that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. In his speech, Khamenei did not call Trump by name but reiterated a vow of revenge against those who ordered and executed the attack on Soleimani.

“Revenge will certainly happen at the right time,” Khamenei had declared.

Iran blocks social media websites like Facebook and Twitter, and censors others. While senior officials have unlimited access to social media, Iran’s youth and tech-savvy citizens use proxy servers or other solutions to bypass controls.

Shortly after Trump’s Twitter ban sparked calls to attack tweets from other political leaders, the company removed a post from a different account linked to Khamenei that was pushing a COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theory.

Khamenei, who has the last word on all state affairs in Iran, had claimed that virus vaccines imported from the United States or Britain were “completely unreliable.”