Twitter suspends terror victim’s page: Photo of wounds ‘gratuitous gore’
“Palestinian terrorists did this to me while hacking up my Christian friend in front of me,” tweeted Kay Wilson.
By MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMANKay Wilson(photo credit: Courtesy)
Twitter temporarily shut down the account of terror survivor Kay Wilson after she posted a picture of her wounds on the microblogging platform.Wilson, who survived a machete attack by Palestinian terrorists in 2010 – an attack which murdered her friend Kristen Luken – posted an image of the bloody and near-deadly slashes across her back that she received in the attack with an appeal to the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to stop funding terrorists.“Palestinian terrorists did this to me while hacking up my Christian friend in front of me,” tweeted Wilson. “The terrorists receive a Palestinian Authority salary, $3,000 a month, taken from UK @DFID foreign aid FYI @BorisJohnson thank you in advance for stopping it. #JewishandProud @palwatch.”Twitter then locked Wilson’s account, sending her a message that the post was in violation of its rules against posting images or videos depicting “gratuitous gore.”“You may not share excessively graphic media (e.g. severe injuries, torture),” Twitter messaged Wilson. “Exposure to gratuitous gore can be harmful, especially if the content is posted with the internet to delight in cruelty or for sadistic pleasure.”Twitter warned Wilson in its note that “repeated violations may lead to a permanent suspension of your account.”Wilson called Twitter’s decision “ridiculous” and said, “I never post anything hateful – nothing. This was simply to show the effect of what terror does physically. I wanted to bring it to the attention of the British government, and sometimes visuals are more powerful than words.”She also said that within minutes of posting the picture it began to go viral. Currently, the post has 2,600 retweets and more than 3,800 likes. In addition, she received many comments from Palestinians and Arabs commenting on how horrified they were by her injuries.“May Allah protect you, Kay. Greetings from Saudi,” wrote one commenter.“As a Palestinian, I’m very sorry this happened to you,” wrote another.
Wilson said she did not post the image with “intent to ‘delight in cruelty or for sadistic pleasure’ as Twitter’s rules state. I posted it to show the world the true physical scars of terror, and the insanity of the British government giving money to the PA which rewards the terrorists.“Twitter might consider that too graphic, but this is my reality,” she continued. “Since my attack, good people, Christian, Jewish and Muslim alike, continue to send me messages of sympathy and support and I am grateful beyond words for that. They have maintained my faith in humankind and deserve to know what terror really looks like.”Wilson recently joined Palestinian Media Watch as the liaison to Palestinians. PMW, an Israeli watchdog organization, has been at the forefront of the fight for enactment of the Pay-for-Slay law, which instructs the state to deduct and freeze the amount of money the PA pays in salaries to imprisoned terrorists and families of “martyrs” from the tax money it collects for the authority.Wilson holds dual Israeli and British citizenship.A spokesperson for Twitter told The Jerusalem Post the account was locked in error and that the social media giant is in direct communication with the user.