CNN correspondent says there's 'clearly big holes' in Twitter policy, as Taliban use network while Trump is banned
After the Taliban took over Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul, O’Sullivan pointed out that “the former President of the United States is banned from Twitter but the Taliban is not.”
“Whether you agree with deplatforming or not, there’s clearly some big holes in the company’s policy,” he observed.
Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid has been active on Twitter since April 2017 and has nearly 300,000 followers. On Monday, after the Taliban took Kabul, he tweeted that “the general public is happy with the arrival of the Mujahideen and satisfied with the security.”
Twitter has also refused to rule out handing over Afghanistan’s official government accounts to the country’s new Taliban leaders.
Other social networks, including Facebook, have banned content from the Taliban.
Though many social media users have protested Trump’s Twitter ban, some liberal commentators responded to O’Sullivan’s posts by arguing that the former president was a greater threat than the Taliban and thus deserved the suspension.
“One is an existential threat to our country...one is not,” tweeted one user, while journalist Eric Boehlert wrote, “Trump relentlessly violated Twitter’s terms of service. Has the Taliban account?”
USA Today opinion columnist and former federal prosecutor Michael J. Stern claimed boldly that “the former President has done more damage to the United States” than the Taliban. Matt Negrin, a producer for the Daily Show with Trevor Noah, noted that the Taliban “acknowledged the results of the 2020 election” while “Republicans have not.”
Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter in January after a group of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in Washington, DC to protest Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.
Twitter claimed that Trump would not be able to use the platform “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”