Social media barons strike at the very core of free speech

PRESIDENT Trump rightly faced the wrath of the world for triggering an assault on a bastion of democracy, but that Twitter should ban a democratically elected leader who recently won 74 million votes is more worrying for the long term health of democracy.

- Tim Newark

Increasingly, a handful of big tech billionaires based in California are deciding who and what can be discussed on their global social media platforms. Quick to silence Trump and his followers, they have been far less keen on muzzling Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei when he called for the genocide of Israel and Jewish people.

Questioned about this disparity, a Twitter spokesperson dismissed the Ayatollah’s threats as “foreign policy sabre-rattling”, prompting a human rights lawyer to say “Calling for genocide on Twitter is OK, but commenting on political situations in certain countries is not OK?”

The Iranian leader’s shared tweets calling Israel a “deadly, cancerous growth” have gone unchecked on Twitter, but the California-based media empire was spurred into limited action last week when the Ayatollah said vaccines imported from the UK and US were “completely untrustworthy”, but still his account was not permanently suspended.