JERUSALEM (JTA) — Twitter has blocked two accounts belonging to Hamas and closed or blocked some 35 Hamas and Hezbollah accounts in Israel.
The action comes about two weeks after Israel’s public security and strategic affairs minister, Gilad Erdan, sent a letter to the social media network’s CEO and executive chairman saying that Twitter has been “largely irresponsive to requests by the Israeli authorities to remove terrorist content and shut down terrorist accounts.”
Erdan said in the letter that “enabling terrorist organizations to operate freely and spread their messages via your platform may be a violation of existing Israeli law regarding providing support to terrorist organizations.”
The letter supplied a partial list of Twitter accounts affiliated with terror organizations and threatened legal action if they are not removed.
On Monday, a visit to the Twitter page of @hamasinfo from an Israeli computer account read “@hamasinfo’s account has been withheld in Israel in response to a legal demand.”
It can be accessed outside of Israel, however, where it contains a warning reading “Caution: This profile may include potentially sensitive content.”
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