Twitter Bans Trump’s Retweeted Anti-Muslim Videos In Anti-Hate Speech Measure

Twitter suspended the accounts of the far-right leaders of Britain First Monday, thus scrapping several anti-Muslim videos they posted that were retweeted by President Donald Trump.

Britan First leader Paul Golding and his deputy Jayda Fransen were banished from Twitter and their old posts were also deleted. Three anti-Muslim videos Fransen posted that were retweeted by Trump in November are also gone. Twitter has stepped up new anti-hate speech measures and began enforcing them Monday. Britain First’s account was also banished.

“If an account’s profile information includes a violent threat or multiple slurs, epithets, racist or sexist tropes, incites fear, or reduces someone to less than human, it will be permanently suspended,” said a Twitter spokesperson to the BBC.

Twitter is banning accounts that promote violence or are associated with white supremacy, Nazi ideology, anti-Semitism or other extreme views. Britain First has made anti-Islam speeches and expressed ultranationalist viewpoints.

The videos Trump retweeted from Fransen featured misleading captions and content. One video purports to be a “Muslim migrant” attacking a Dutch boy on crutches. Dutch police later confirmed that neither of the boys featured in the video was a Muslim or an immigrant. The second video showed a man smashing a statue of the Virgin Mary with the man saying “No-one but Allah will be worshipped in the land of the Levant.”

The third video came from riots that took place in Egypt in 2013. The video depicts a man being thrown from a roof in Alexandria. The men who were responsible for the violence were prosecuted, and one was executed. Fransen wrote “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!”

British Prime Minister Theresa May said it was wrong for Trump to have reposted the videos.

“Whether it's a real video, the threat is real. His goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in response to the controversy surrounding Trump's decision to retweet the videos.

The new stricter policy kicked several American users off the platform, as well. The American Nazi Party’s account was banned, as was the account of Jared Taylor, head of American Renaissance, a white supremacist magazine that bills itself as a “white advocacy organization.” The Traditionalist Worker Party, a group in part founded by neo-Nazi Tony Hovater got banned, as did End Time Paradigm, an anti-Semitic account.

Twitter said the measure was to “reduce the amount of abusive behavior and hateful conduct” on the platform.