Twitter Deletes Ex-Malaysia PM’s Tweet Glorifying Nice Attack

France has called for the suspension of former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s Twitter account.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

(Photo: PTI)

Social media platform Twitter on Thursday, 30 October, deleted a tweet by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, for glorifying the Nice attack in which three people were killed.

France's Secretary for Digital Sector Cedric O, joined many people on social media, in condemning the post and urged the platform to suspend his account.

In a tweet, Cedric added:

“I just spoke with the Managing Director of Twitter France. The account of former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad must be immediately suspended. If not, Twitter would be an accomplice to a formal call for murder.”

However, after the tweets were deleted, Mahathir said in a statement that his comments “had been taken out of context”.

WHAT HAD HAPPENED?

In a series of 13 tweets, Mahathir on Thursday lashed out at the French government over remarks by President Emmanuel Macron describing Islam as a religion “in crisis” after a school teacher in Paris was beheaded for showing cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammed in class.

"We often copy the ways of the West. We dress like them, we adopt their political systems, even some of their strange practices. But we have our own values, different as between races and religions, which we need to sustain," Mahathir wrote on Twitter.

“Generally, the West no longer adheres to their own religion. They are Christians in name only,” he took a dig.

While Twitter left the rest of the thread, it deleted one controversial tweet.

In a gory incident, a knife-wielding man killed two women and a man at the Notre-Dame Basilica in Nice and injured several others.