Twitter permanently shut down an account that appeared to belong to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Friday after a tweet that hinted at violence against former president Donald Trump.
While a number of news agencies, along with some analysts, said that the account belonged to Iran’s leader — who retweeted the image in question from a known account among the several he uses — a spokesperson for Twitter suggested that the account of @khamenei_site had not been suspended because of the threat but because the account was fake.
“The account violated our platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts, and has been permanently suspended,” the company said in a statement.
The suspension came amid a wider call to permanently ban Khamenei from the social network. Khamenei uses the site despite a ban on Twitter in Iran and amid a new wave of scrutiny on the treatment of world leaders on social media platforms after the banning of Trump this month in the aftermath of the U.S. Capitol riot, which social media companies accused Trump of inciting.
“The accounts of the Office of Iran’s Supreme Leader should be suspended from Twitter for repeatedly sending out tweets inciting violence and spewing disinformation,” said Jason Brodsky, policy director at the advocacy group United Against a Nuclear Iran.
The @khamenei_site account had shared an aerial image of a golfer resembling Trump under a looming shadow on Thursday, with a message referring to the U.S. airstrike that killed an Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani, in Baghdad last year.
“Revenge is inevitable,” read a message accompanying the image.
Though the message did not name Trump, it was widely interpreted as a threat to the former president. Trump ordered the killing of Soleimani, the leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ elite Quds Force, in January 2020.
The exact nature of the @khamenei_site account, which had only a few thousand followers, remains unclear. It was created in July 2020 and shared articles from Khamenei’s official website, including the image of the golfing man. Khamenei’s main English-language account had followed it and his Farsi-language account had retweeted it.
WASHINGTON POST