DUBAI: Iran’s supreme leader should be banned from Twitter, respondents to an Arab News poll said.
Of the 1,091 votes, 66.9 percent of Twitter poll said they supported a ban.
The poll comes just days after the social networking site suspended Donald Trump’s account indefinitely amid fears he would incite further violence in the US capital in the lead up to Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Twitter previously removed individual tweets that Trump wrote claiming electoral fraud without any evidence.
#POLL: Should @Twitter also ban #Iran’s supreme leader @khamenei_ir?
— Arab News (@arabnews) January 9, 2021
Meanwhile Twitter has also removed a tweet by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that questioned the COVID-19 vaccines from the US and the UK.
His tweet followed a ban on importing the vaccines from the two countries into Iran, with Khamenei saying they were “completely untrustworthy.”
“The import of American and British vaccines is prohibited… It is not unlikely they would want to contaminate other nations,” the Iranian leader said in a speech, which was also posted on Twitter.
He also said: “Given our experience with France’s HIV-tainted blood supplied, French vaccines aren’t trustworthy either.”
The tweet has since been taken down on Khamenei’s English and Arabic accounts, but is still available on his Persian account.
Twitter said the tweet violated the social media platform’s rules.
Twitter has recently been clamping down on accounts.
Earlier, the social media giant permanently cut off US President Donald Trump’s personal account and access to his nearly 90 million followers late on Friday, citing the risk of further incitement of violence, three days after Trump called on thousands of supporters to march on the Capitol as Congress met to certify his defeat to Democrat Joe Biden.
Twitter has long resisted pressure to suspend Trump’s account. But after a “close review” of the president’s recent tweets, the company said on Friday evening it “had permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Trump later used the official @POTUS government to lash out at Twitter, addressing the 75 million “great patriots” who voted for him: “We will not be SILENCED!” Trump said he was considering building his own social media platform.
Twitter quickly deleted those posts and soon after suspended the Trump campaign account.
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