BELGRADE, August 17. /TASS/. Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic expects that Twitter will block his profile in the same fashion the networking and blogging service eliminated Donald Trump’s account.
"Who is the censor after all?" Vucic told the media on Tuesday. "They (Twitter - TASS) are positioning themselves as censors. I expect they may turn off my profile any minute, thus turning me into another Trump in this world," Vucic said, adding that the press-secretary of the Taliban movement (outlawed in Russia) had free access to Twitter.
About the service’s policy of marking Serbian mass media as resources cooperating with the authorities Vucic said: "I am curious why you are so much worried they have said something very nice about these mass media. Because who else should the media cooperate with - the oligarchs, the thieves and organized crime? That they cooperate with the authorities is normal. We as a state do not fund most of these mass media, while they finance the Voice of America (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia) and the BBC. But they did not say that these are pro-government media - not those which just cooperate. They are government media."
Earlier, Twitter said it was going to introduce new labels for the profiles of government and state-affiliated accounts in another 16 countries.
In August last year, such labels were introduced for the permanent members of the UN Security Council (Russia, the United States, France, Britain and China). The new list includes Canada, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Germany, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Spain, Thailand, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
The labels were attached to the accounts of key officials, including foreign ministers, public organizations, ambassadors, spokespersons and key diplomats, as well as the accounts of government mass media.