Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi’s Suspended Twitter Account Reopens Following Verification
The Claim
Twitter suspends/deletes Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi's account for political reasons and for violating Twitter's rules.
News posted on
Emerging story
Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Libyan ex-ruler Muammar Gaddafi, was suspended from Twitter on November 17, 2021. The suspension of Saif Gaddafi's Twitter account came just 24 hours after he launched it and just a few days after he announced his candidacy to run in Libya's upcoming presidential elections.
There was no clear explanation for the suspension on Twitter's part, so many media outlets and users began speculating about what might have been the reason for the ban. False information about the suspension began to circulate. Some have claimed that Gaddafi was suspended because he is a criminal and an advocate for hate speech, which violates Twitter's rules and policies, while others have defended his right to freedom of speech.
Misbar’s Analysis
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi in 2011 after he was accused of crimes against humanity, murder, and persecutory acts during the 2011 civil war in Libya.
Gaddafi's candidacy for presidential elections came after Libyan militias imprisoned him for several years. Both his and General Khalifa Haftar's candidacies sparked a wave of unrest in Libya, as many saw them as war criminals and demanded that the electoral authorities reject their candidacies.
Gaddafi published his first tweet urging Libyans to vote in the upcoming presidential elections days after declaring his candidacy. Many people reacted angrily to the younger Ghaddafi's use of the phrase because they viewed his father as a dictator.
The decision to suspend Ghaddafi's Twitter account has nothing to do with his political background or the content of his tweets. On Facebook, the official media page of Muammar Gaddafi's family stated that the suspension of Saif Ghaddafi's Twitter account was a temporary procedure related to the authentication and verification of the account, which had a record-breaking "following" (over 26k followers within 24 hours). According to the statement, the account would be back soon.
Once the account resumed from the temporary suspension, Gaddafi published another tweet on November 22. He urged Libyans to hurry up and receive their electoral cards for the country to regain its national sovereignty, free will, unity, and rebuilding. When exploring Twitter’s rules and policies, it has been stated that an account may be subject to temporary suspension when the identity of the users needs to be verified due to suspicious behavior or for being reported as a violation. Additionally, Twitter usually does not delete or suspend an account permanently on the first detection/report. The only case where an account would be permanently suspended for the first time is when it commits a ‘’severe violation’’. This includes the violation of Twitter rules regarding violence, sexual abuse, terrorism tec.
It is worth noting that the tweet in which Gaddafi borrows his father’s phrase was not deleted from the account. According to its rules and policies, such a procedure would have occurred if the tweet had violated Twitter’s rules. Misbar accordingly finds the claim that Ghaddafi’s Twitter account was suspended or deleted for political reasons or for violating Twitter’s rules misleading. It was instead a temporary suspension, after which the account returned to functioning normally.
