Twitter suspended the account of far-right Belgian student group Schild en Vrienden as part of a trawl of material that barred more than 50 accounts from its site.
In a statement to NBC News on Friday, Twitter said “the accounts in question were suspended for violating our policies in relation to violent extremism.” The decision followed the publication of a report this week identifying 67 accounts connected to the so-called Identitarian movement, a transatlantic group of white supremacists.
Belgian MP for the far-right Vlaams Belang, Dries Van Langenhove, used his personal Twitter account to slam the decision. “Today it’s Schild en Vrienden, tomorrow it’s the next [one], until everyone with a migration-critical opinion has been silenced,” he tweeted.
Van Langenhove founded the nationalist youth organization in 2017, according to De Morgen. The outlet reported that the group gained notoriety in Belgium after the VRT program Pano aired evidence of its members sharing racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic content in secret chat groups.
The account of Martin Sellner, the leader of Austria’s Identitären Bewegung Österreich (IBÖ), was also taken down, NBC reported.
The report by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which triggered the suspensions, found that Generation Identity groups were “rampant” on Twitter and Youtube, “even though such propaganda has inspired six mass attacks since October 2018.”