Ex-US President Slams Twitter For Allowing Taliban To Give Updates Via Social Media

Former United States President Donald Trump continues to be banned from Twitter for the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. But with the world now closely monitoring the Afghanistan crisis, the 75-year-old has lashed out at the social media platform for not applying the same on the Taliban group.

“It’s disgraceful when you think that you have killers and muggers and dictators and horrible — some horrible dictators and countries, and they’re all on but the president of the United States, who had hundreds of millions of people, by the way, he gets taken off,” Trump reportedly said to Newsmax via a telephone interview.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has been providing updates on Twitter about their activities, particularly about the capture of Afghan cities. They have aggressively taken over the country and the unverified account has now over 326,000 followers.

Aside from Mujahid, there is another Taliban spokesman who has used Twitter to provide updates in Qari Yousaf Ahmadi. He has more than 66,000 followers as of this writing.

Twitter has already issued a blanket statement on the Islamic militant group’s presence on their platform. However, they have not addressed the criticism of Trump.

“We will continue to proactively enforce our rules and review content that may violate Twitter Rules, specifically policies against glorification of violence, platform manipulation and spam,” part of the social media platform’s statement read.

Trump was banned due to the risk of further incitement of violence tied to the Capitol insurrection. The former US president sued Twitter along with Facebook and YouTube for shutting him out, something he branded as illegal and shameful censorship of the American people.

But the difference with the Taliban group’s Twitter accounts. Although they have been known to use extreme violence, especially against women, academics and anyone who opposes the group’s fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, nothing has gotten that far for now.

Other social media companies, including Facebook and TikTok, have been more proactive in limiting the reach of the Taliban.