Iran leader’s Facebook, Instagram accounts banned for violating Meta policy
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said on Thursday (February 8) that it had banned.
The accounts of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for violating the social media organisation’s “content policy”. “We have removed these accounts for repeatedly violating our Dangerous Organisations & Individuals policy,” a Meta spokesperson told news agency AFP.
The Facebook and Instagram accounts of Khamenei, according to Meta, were reportedly part of a network that engaged in “inauthentic activity” and “misleading people” about “who they are and what they are doing”, news website Al Bawaba reported.
On opening Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Instagram account, a “this page isn’t available” message is popping up on the screen. Meta reportedly removed as many as 200 Facebook and 125 Instagram accounts, nine groups and 29 pages linked to the said Iranian network, the Al Bawaba report further stated.
Though Meta did not mention the Israel-Hamas war, the technology conglomerate has been under pressure lately to ban Iran’s Supreme Leader ever since the October 7 attack by the Palestinian group, which is supported by Iran.
Meta’s policy, on which the decision was based, says that organisations or individuals that ” proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence to have a presence on our platforms” are not permitted on the firm’s social media portals, in an “effort to prevent and disrupt real-world harm”.
The policy further stated that Meta will remove “glorification, support and representation of various dangerous organizations and individuals”.
Iran was one of the first countries to laud Hamas’s attack against Israel, in which more than 1,000 people were killed and over 200 were taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip. In power in the country for 35 years, Khamenei praised the killing spree to his millions of followers, and in broken Hebrew tweeted to Israelis, writing, “You brought this calamity upon yourselves”.
“Dictatorial Zionists, you cannot recover from the defeat of October 7,” Khamenei tweeted on October 10, three days after the terror onslaught.
Khamenei had five million followers on Instagram.
Although Instagram and Facebook are prohibited in Iran, citizens of the country can use the social media portals via virtual private networks (VPNs) to evade restrictions and access banned websites or apps.
On X though, Khamenei’s accounts are still active. AFP, citing a 2020 statement by an executive at the company, reported that it had told Israeli lawmakers that the Iran’s Supreme Leader’s calls for Israel’s destruction do not violate its rules against hate speech, implying they are meagre “foreign policy sabre-rattling”.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has continued to express support for Hamas as the Gaza war exceeded four months, and has also lauded the attacks on ships in the Red Sea by Yemen’s Houthi rebels – which, similar to Hamas, are backed by Iran.
Last month, Khamenei tweeted that Israel’s counteroffensive in the Gaza Strip for the October 7 attack, which he called “crimes”, “will not be forgotten even after the Zionist regime is destroyed by the grace of God”.