- At least two Taliban officials had blue ticks on their Twitter accounts Monday, the BBC said.
- This sparked outrage and the ticks appear to have been removed on Tuesday.
- Governments around the world are still wrestling with whether to recognize the Islamist regime.
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Senior Taliban officials and their supporters – who wore Twitter’s $8-a-month blue verification badges until Monday – appear to be unverified by Twitter after a BBC report sparked indignation.
The BBC reported on Monday that the Twitter accounts of at least two Taliban officials and four known supporters of the regime were ticked. they include Hedayatullah Hedayat, Head of the Taliban Access to Information Department and Abdul Haq Hammad, who heads the regime’s media watchdog. They have around 190,000 and 170,000 followers respectively.
The accounts will no longer be accompanied by the tick marks on Tuesday night.
It is unclear whether Twitter has removed the blue badges from accounts linked to the Taliban, or whether the account holders have opted out of the Twitter Blue service. The blue tick from Hedayat’s account was last removed in December, the BBC reported, citing local media.
Twitter and the Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture did not immediately respond to insider requests for comments sent outside of regular business hours. Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has disbanded the company’s communications team.
Twitter Blue is a paid subscription service that bills users for a blue tick next to their account name and offers early access to certain features. The program costs $8 a month for web users in the US and is one of CEO Elon Musk’s strategies to monetize the platform – which he said is losing $4 million a day.
The Taliban’s presence on Western social media is a point of contention and controversy as the US and governments around the world wrestle over whether to recognize the Islamist regime. Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, they have committed numerous human rights abuses, the United Nations mission in the country said in July 2022. The regime has also banned women from attending universities.
Social media platforms also had to make a choice – Facebook and YouTube have banned the Taliban, but not Twitter. Former President Donald Trump criticized the Taliban’s presence on Twitter in October 2021, months after his own account was permanently banned.
“We live in a world where the Taliban have a huge presence on Twitter, but your favorite American president has been silenced,” Trump said in a press release announcing the launch of Truth Social in October 2021. “This is unacceptable.”
Trump’s account was restored in November 2022 by Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter.