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Earlier this week, President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, retweeted a series of inflammatory anti-Muslims tweets purporting to show violence done by Muslims.
The tweets were titled, “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” “Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!” and “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!” and showed Muslims indulged in violent acts against non-Muslims. The authenticity of the videos is highly questionable and Trump didn’t even know the original person who tweeted those videos.
The array of retweets caused international spark and outrage. International figures and politicians condemned the act of Trump. This is the first time that a modern time President of America has tweeted inflammatory content.
While the internet and media got into a frenzy, several people were quick to report this content on the popular social networking platform Twitter. Since the content was graphic and violent, it checked many pointers to be removed from the social media website.
Twitter said that it has decided to keep the array of videos on its platform owing to its policy of keeping content “newsworthy for the public interest,”. The response of Twitter received huge outrage from social media users and then the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, retracted the company’s earlier statement and agreed that the reason due to which the media is kept online was indeed wrong.
He came up with another reason to continue to host such content on its platform.
We mistakenly pointed to the wrong reason we didn’t take action on the videos from earlier this week. We’re still looking critically at all of our current policies, and appreciate all the feedback. See our safety calendar for our plans and ship dates. https://t.co/yGytH3eskM
— jack (@jack) December 1, 2017
To clarify: these videos are not being kept up because they are newsworthy or for public interest. Rather, these videos are permitted on Twitter based on our current media policy. https://t.co/RqEQy3skgc
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) December 1, 2017
The recent retweets by Trump fuels nothing but hate, and violence against Muslims. Twitter as a social media platform should keep a check on its policies to avoid hate, violence and abusive content on its platform.
