Hezbollah dismissed from virtual heaven

A social media website cancelled all pages related to Hezbollah and its media. Consequently, Hezbollah and Manar TV’s pages disappeared; days after Manar TV was trying to create pages with different titles.          

Facebook is not too far from this kind of issues, as it has always deleted pages for Hezbollah and its Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, accompanying these steps with warnings to the creators of the pages, claiming that they are spreading terrorism and hatred.           

In this context, Apple and Google companies were the predecessors as they already disabled the mobile application of al-Manar TV from smartphones.            

But the beginning was during the end of last July when a report was issued by the Middle East Institute for Media Research raising the issue of the “heavy use of social media by Hezbollah through Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and mobile applications”.           

The Institute called for driving Hezbollah off the social media platform under a pretext that this activity is contrary to the US laws banning the companies on its land to work with organization listed as terrorist.          

However, Twitter refused to delete al-Manar TV’s account saying that the website encourages the freedom of expression. For its part, Youtube is somehow confused; it is true that it did not remove al-Manar TV’s account, but it feels free to remove parts of videos it sees that encourage terrorism.