Journalist Support Committee: Twitter rejects Israeli demands to delete Palestinian Tweets

The Journalist Support Committee in Palestine praised the high professionalism of Twitter's management refusing to subject to Israeli pressures to delete the Palestinian content.

The newspaper "Haaretz" has revealed on Tuesday, 20 March 2018, that the Israeli authorities are planning to exert pressure on the social networking site "Twitter", in order to prevent Palestinian twittering against the occupation.

The newspaper revealed that the judicial organs of the occupation monitored the transition of Palestinian activists from working through Facebook to Twitter.

The Journalist Support Committee noted that all conventions and international laws call for the promotion of public and personal freedoms in a framework that respects the human rights system and promotes the work, enforcement, and application of the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

The Committee reiterated its rejection of the repeated Israeli demands to Facebook to delete Palestinian content and close hundreds of Palestinian pages for no apparent reason or prior warning.

Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked praised the excellent cooperation with Facebook in the field of "combating Palestinian terrorism" compared with the lack of cooperation on the part of Twitter.

"Twitter is not rushing to comply with content removal demands, but only complies with orders issued from the court, unlike Facebook," Haim Wismonsky, Director of Cyber Unit State Attorney Office Israel, stated to Haaretz.

The committee called on Palestinian activists to continue their work in high professionalism and to promote Palestinian content to serve the Palestinian cause.

The committee pointed out that it is in the process of holding specialized courses and workshops with Palestinian media institutions aimed at developing the Palestinian content in accordance with the journalistic principles and laws governing the ethics of journalism.

Journalist Support Committee - Palestine
20 March 2018