Twitter closes accounts of Hezbollah TV and Houthi forces

Twitter has blocked the account of Al-Manar TV, belonging to Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah, saying it has not followed its rules.

Al-Manar has called the blocking a “political” act. Currently, the page is completely blank.

Twitter has also blocked an account belonging to Yemen’s Houthis, called “The Central Warfare Channel”.

In August 2018, Facebook and Twitter closed hundreds of Iran-connected accounts, saying they were part of an Iranian project to covertly influence public opinion in other countries.

In April, one day after the United States listed Iran’s Revolution Guard Corps, IRGC as a terrorist group, Instagram deleted pages belonging to its top commanders, including Qods force commander Qassem Soleimani.

One day later, the accounts of Ebrahim Raeesi, head of Iran’s Judiciary and Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign policy advisor of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei were suspended, but soon restored.

There have been numerous reports of overt and covert operations by Iran-affiliated individuals and accounts online spreading disinformation or militant propaganda.

Twitter has also blocked a news account associated with the Houthi movement in Yemen, called “The Central Warfare Channel,” according to an Iranian news outlet.

In a letter to Twitter in September, the US lawmakers first raised their concern about the Hamas and Hezbollah accounts and then held a public press conference criticising Twitter’s stance last month when the platform declined to take down the accounts.

“My colleagues and I were outraged when [Twitter] first responded to us — contrary to Facebook and Google, [Twitter] insisted that they were going to keep up the content of … Hezbollah and Hamas,” Gottheimer told The Hill in a phone interview from his district on Monday.

“To me, it’s essential that they’ve taken these steps to scrape the content and the handles of foreign terrorist organizations off their site,” Gottheimer said.

In a letter, twitter’s US Policy Director Carlos Monje told the lawmakers that the platform allows accounts associated with the political arms of groups designated by the U.S. as “foreign terrorist organizations,” though it does not allow their military wings to have a presence on the platform.