Twitter has reinstated the account of Canary Mission—a blacklist of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activists, academics and organizations—following confusion over the tweet by the watchdog earlier this month.
“After 2 weeks of being locked, and after 3 rejected appeals, we just received an email from Twitter stating: ‘After further review, we have unsuspended your account as it does not appear to be in violation of the Twitter Rules,’ ” Canary Mission told JNS. “We are grateful to all our supporters, who asked Twitter to reverse their original shameful decision.”
Canary Mission tweeted earlier this month: “.@thisisuic student Niveen Nabulsi @niv33n enjoyed her uber ride: ‘We’re bonding with our Uber driver over our hatred for Zionists and how they control the media.’ #AntiSemitism.” The tweet has apparently been deleted.
We’re bonding with our Uber driver over our hatred for Zionists and how they control the media. He’s also pro-Palestinian and Muslim #bless — Niveen / نيڤين (@niv33n) July 5, 2017
After Nabulsi, a senior at the University of Illinois in Chicago, complained to Twitter, Canary Mission’s account was locked for exposing her racism, the watchdog told JNS.
Canary Mission added that it received a fake email two days before Nabulsi’s complaint to Twitter, allegedly from Nabulsi herself. The message claimed to be from a UIC official.
“When Canary Mission’s account was first locked, we were certain it had to be a mistake. Twitter claimed that we had violated their rules on hateful conduct, and we knew we had done nothing of the sort,” according to the organization. “Nabulsi however clearly had. We assumed it was therefore a case of mistaken identity—that they had meant to lock Nabulsi’s account mistakenly locked ours.”
Reportedly, this is not the first time that Canary Mission’s Twitter account was locked. In March, its access to the social-media platform was blocked due to it highlighting the now-deleted tweet former University of Texas student Ahmed Ellahi: @dallasmau5 modified the popular British singer Adele’s lyrics to say “Set Fire to the Jews.”
After much backlash, Twitter reinstated the tweet. “Now, once again Twitter has repeated its previous action, siding with anti-Semitism,” Canary Mission told JNS.
Canary Mission’s last tweet is dated Oct. 10.
A Twitter spokesperson told JNS that “the current policy requires dehumanization to be targeted at an individual. We also recently called for public input to help us determine what the new dehumanization policy will address (that comment period closed 10/9). Our updated policy could consider that particular tweet in violation of our rules, but that policy is not currently in place.”
The spokesperson declined to comment on Canary Mission’s case, citing privacy and security reasons.
