Egyptian Actor Tweeted ‘Let’s Kill Some Jews.’ Twitter Kept It Up For 11 Hours.
Image by Nikki Casey
By Aiden Pink July 1, 2019
Updated 4:55. p.m.
An Egyptian actor with more than 800,000 followers on Twitter posted a message calling for violence against Jews on Monday, but the social media company kept it up for nearly 12 hours before suspending his account.
Hesham Mansour tweeted “Now lets kill some jews” [sic] at 4:50 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, and the message remained online for around 11 hours. In the interim, it was retweeted more than 325 times.
A search of Mansour’s Twitter history revealed dozens of violent anti-Semitic tweets, many written in the past month or so.
“Watch me torture jews, when the time comes,” he wrote on June 29. “And watch the whole world watch in silence.”
“All negativity in the world, caused by jews. All terrorism in the world, caused by jews. All depression, darkness, also jews,” he wrote a week prior. “They stole all the positive energy! And as of 2019, it has begun returning to its rightful owners.”
He has also claimed 20 million Jews were raped by Jews this year, and that Jews controlled the space-time continuum.
Despite these tweets, which appear to violate Twitter’s policies against threatening violence and hateful conduct, Mansour’s tweets remained live and Mansour was categorized as a verified user, which means that Twitter considers it an authentic account of public interest.
“The account has been suspended for multiple violations of the Twitter Rules,” a Twitter spokesperson told the Forward in an email after this article was originally published. The spokesperson did not answer the Forward’s question about why the account was live for so long.
In the last two years, Twitter has de-verified several accounts for anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, including the pages of Louis Farrakhan and Richard Spencer.
“The account has been suspended for multiple violations of the Twitter Rules.”
The social media company has long struggled with removing white nationalists from the platform while balancing concerns about freedom of speech.
Aiden Pink is the deputy news editor of the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
