UK Hate-Preacher Anjem Choudary Made an Extremely Brief Return to Social Media

An attempt by Britain’s most notorious hate preacher to regain a mouthpiece on social media has been swiftly snuffed out, falling foul of the platforms’ policies against extremism within just days.

Anjem Choudary, a radical Islamist preacher who headed the now banned extremist network Al-Muhajiroun, said he had been kicked off Twitter and Facebook this week with days of signing up.

“I think I was back on Twitter on Saturday and it was taken down on Wednesday,” he told VICE World News. “And I logged into Facebook for literally about eight minutes on Thursday before it was taken down.”

Twitter said that Choudary’s account had been permanently suspended for breaching its violent organisations policy, while Facebook did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.

The 54-year-old Londoner’s attempt to join the platforms came shortly after the expiry of a raft of restrictions, including a ban on public speaking, that had been imposed on him following his release on license from prison in 2018.

After years as the face of radical Islam in Britain, Choudary was jailed for five-and-a-half years in 2016 on a conviction for inviting support for ISIS; he was released automatically halfway through his sentence.

His radical network, Al-Muhajiroun, went through a number of incarnations as it was progressively banned under British law following the London terror attacks in 2005. The network has been linked to a string of atrocities in the UK and further afield, with people who have passed through the group involved in attacks including the 2013 murder of British soldier Lee Rigby on a London street, the London Bridge and Westminster Bridge terror attacks in 2017, and an attack at Fishmongers Hall in 2019.

 Social media giants like Twitter and Facebook have been coming under increasing pressure to remove extremist content from their platforms, amid growing scrutiny of their role in violent radicalisation.