Everyone knows Tweeting is only for infidels.
(JPost) — The Saudi grand mufti on Friday called social-networking website Twitter full of lies, a day after the site announced that it would begin restricting Tweets in specific countries.
The news from the social media platform is renewing questions over how it will handle issues of free speech as it rapidly expands its global user base.
Until now, Twitter had to remove a tweet from its global network if it received a takedown request from a government.
But the company said in a blog post published on Thursday that it now has the ability to selectively block a Tweet from appearing to users in one country.
“Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world,” the Twitter blog said.
In the interest of transparency, Twitter said, it has built a mechanism to inform users in the event that a tweet is being blocked. A Twitter spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the blog post.
Saudi Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh said in his Friday sermon in Riyadh that Muslims should avoid being a “source or feeding” Twitter, the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper reported.
Twitter was a place “in which people are invited to throw charges between them, and to lie in a manner that brings fame to some,” he said.
The 71-year-old cleric called on those present to warn people about such sites, adding that positive sites do exist on the Internet concerning science, business and God.