Taliban
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The Washington Post has come under heavy criticism for a Wednesday article suggesting that the “sophisticated” Taliban incite less violence and hate speech on social media than former President Donald Trump.

In an article titled “Today’s Taliban uses sophisticated social media practices that rarely violate the rules,” the Post alleged that social media accounts attributed to the Taliban, specifically focusing on Twitter, were able to keep up with “the evolving boundaries of taste and content that tech companies use to police user behavior.”

They gave as an example the fact that Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid has been able to regularly post on Twitter, generating a following of 326,000 users.

A second Taliban spokesperson, Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, has over 66,000 Twitter followers.

At the same time, Trump is still banned from Twitter and Facebook stemming from the January 6 Captiol riots.

On Wednesday, Trump denounced Twitter for allowing the Taliban to have access to its platform to give updates on their takeover of Afghanistan, while refusing to reinstate the former president.

“It’s disgraceful when you think that you have killers and muggers and dictators and horrible – some horrible dictators and countries, and they’re all on but the president of the United States, who had hundreds of millions of people, by the way, he gets taken off,” Trump said in a Wednesday phone interview with Newsmax.

The Post report went on to speculate the reasons for the Trump’s social media exile while the Taliban have not been banned.

“The answer, analysts said, may simply be that Trump’s posts for years challenged platform rules against hate speech and inciting violence. Today’s Taliban, by and large, does not,” the article alleged.

According to a Thursday report in Forbes, Twitter and Facebook may let the Taliban control Afghan government social media accounts.