Afghanistan’s Taliban has increasingly been using social media, both before and after its takeover of the country back in 2021. Yesterday, the Islamist movement announced which social media platform it prefers.
In an unexpected endorsement, the group’s senior leader, Anas Haqqani, praised the US social media giant Twitter for upholding “freedom of speech” principles and maintaining its “credibility.”
According to Haqqani, Twitter had ‘two important advantages’ over other social media platforms, including its recently launched competitor, Threads, owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which Taliban representative singled out for its purportedly ‘intolerant policy’.
Twitter’s endorsement from the Islamist group comes days after Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta launched Threads, a brand-new microblogging service that has already attracted over 100 million users.
Threads launch has been marred by multiple scandals, with Twitter owner Elon Musk accusing Meta of “systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation” of Twitter’s intellectual property and threatening to sue it.
In an unlikely support voiced by the Islamist group, Taliban official declared that Twitter maintains the ‘freedom of speech’ principle as well as its ‘public nature and credibility’ unlike other social networks and cannot be replaced by ‘other platforms’ altogether.
Since Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in2021, Twitter apparently had become the public communication medium of choice for them.
Taliban currently uses Twitter as a major platform for official announcements, with most government departments having established official Twitter accounts, while Meta is actively closing down accounts associated with the Taliban.
