The Twitter account of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei on Sunday tweeted his criticism of importing "luxury American smartphones" from an iPhone.
In a video conference with President Hassan Rouhani on the occasion of the Government Week Khamenei called for economic reforms and criticized the half a billion-dollar imports of iPhones in the previous Iranian calendar year which ended on March 20.
Pointing out that the imports were made by the private sector Khamenei said "there is no need for importing the phones" and ordered the government to put a stop to it.
A few hours after the meeting, however, his remarks were removed from the text published by his office and his Persian Twitter account also removed the tweet on the subject without any explanation.
However, Khamenei's Twitter account in Russian on the same day tweeted his criticism of "importing luxury American commodities" from an iPhone as seen from the Twitter info in the bottom of the post. Other accounts show using the Twitter Web App, TweetDeck on Android phones. His Russian account was created in January 2020 and has recently used iPhone instead of Twitter Web App.
Khamenei has several Twitter accounts in different languages including English, Arabic, French, Spanish and Russian. In August he opened a new account that tweets in Hindi with his bio written in Devanagari. The account has 7,000 followers and only follows his other accounts.
Khamenei has been accused of glorifying violence through his tweets and violating Twitter rules. In February 2019 Twitter temporarily suspended his account for a post endorsing the religious ruling of his predecessor Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini who condemned the British author Salman Rushdie to death for writing a book called The Satanic Verses.