The Anti-Defamation League is urging Twitter and other social media companies to remove accounts connected to the Taliban, saying it can locate about a dozen active Taliban accounts currently on Twitter.
''There’s no rational reason for the Taliban, a terror group hell-bent on imposing their punitive version of governance on the people of Afghanistan and all those who speak out against their brutality, to be allowed to be on Twitter in an attempt to sanitize their image,'' ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement to The Washington Post.
Analysts like Rita Katz of SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors extremism on the internet, told the Post that ''the Taliban of today is immensely savvy with technology and social media — nothing like the group it was 20 years ago.''
They analysts note that the Taliban skirt the rules on social media by avoiding outright hate speech and calls for violence in their posts.
She added, ''The Taliban is clearly threading the needle regarding social media content policies and is not yet crossing the very distinct policy-violating lines that [former President Donald] Trump crossed.''
However, Katz says, ''This doesn’t mean at all that the Taliban shouldn’t be removed from social media, because the waves of propaganda and messaging it is spreading — permissible as it may seem by some content policy standards — is fueling a newly emboldened and extremely dangerous global Islamist militant movement.''
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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