Twitter has suspended the accounts of seven Serbian embassies and a consulate in the US last week without any explanation, Serbia’s Foreign Ministry in Belgrade said on Monday.
As of August 18, Serbia says its embassies in Armenia, Ghana, Iran, Indonesia, Kuwait, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe had their accounts suspended and the same happened to the Serbian consulate in Chicago, Illinois.
On top of the embassy accounts, Twitter has also suspended the accounts of 13 Serbian ruling party MPs and other government officials for alleged breaking of Twitter’s rules.
Stressing that such censorship of a pro-European democracy that upholds freedom of speech was unacceptable, Serbia demanded Twitter to unblock the accounts, noting that the suspensions were imposed without any explanation from the social media network or prior notice of a possible violation of its rules.
Noting that it has no intention of getting into Twitter’s business policies, Belgrade noted that it’s unacceptable to censor a series of diplomatic offices of a democratic state that has not been sanctioned in any way.
As the Serbian foreign ministry argued in its statement, Serbian political and democratic standards, including media freedoms, are in line with the highest European standards so it considers absurd to be censored on a social network that boasts of promoting diversity of opinion and democracy.
The ministry added it hopes that the suspension isn’t part of some attempt to silence Serbia in its struggle for the truth or to thwart it, in particular about Serbia’s breakaway province of Kosovo.
Kosovo declared independence in 2008 with US support.
The same day that Twitter suspended the embassies’ accounts, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic met with Kosovo Albanian authorities in Brussels for US- EU mediated talks that were supposed to resolve the tensions.
Twitter has cracked down on Serbian accounts in recent years, labeling at the same time a number of Serbian media portals as being under state control or political pressure.
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