Twitter bird. Photo: wiki commons.

Twitter has agreed to remove anti-semitic messages from its French website after a Jewish student union threatened legal action.

The JEJF Jewish students’ union had announced it would be filing a suit against the social media website after a barrage of tweets with the hashtag “#UnBonJuif“—which means “a good Jew” in English, had inundated the website. Examples of the offensive tweets include,”#UnBonJuif = a picture of a handful of ashes,” and “#UnBonJuif is a dead Jew.”

According to the AFP, the group’s lawyer, Stéphane Lilti, announced a “great victory” and said that the group would provide a list of tweets it wanted removed. He did, however, leave open the possibility of a suit against the social media site to force it to surrender the details of offending tweeters.

This comes a day after both social media giants Facebook and Twitter announced they would be taking significant action against threatening and offensive content on their respective sites. Facebook moved to shutdown a webpage belonging to Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, after a campaign to pressure them to do so by the Middle East Media Research Institute.   Also on Thursday Twitter blocked the account of neo-Nazi group Besseres Hannover (Better Hanover) on the request of German police. This was the first time the social media website had applied a policy known as “country-withheld content,” which allows it to block an account at the request of state authorities.