U.S. Embassy in Cairo Briefly Shuts Down Twitter Profile After Morsi Spat

Egyptian president chided the embassy for tweeting the link to a Daily Show segment that criticized him.

The U.S. Embassy in Cairo’s Twitter feed is back online after being briefly taken down Wednesday following an online spat with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.

Foreign Policy’s The Cable blog was first to break the news at around 11:50 a.m. EST Wednesday that the embassy’s profile had been taken down. By 12:20 p.m. it was back online.

U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson chose to take the profile down without consulting State Department officials in Washington, The Cable reported. Those officials later urged her to put the profile back up, according to the post.

Morsi tweeted on Tuesday that the embassy was engaging in “negative political propaganda” after it tweeted a link to a Daily Show riff about the arrest of Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef.

By removing its profile the embassy also removed the tweeted link. The tweeted link to the Daily Show segment remains deleted.

The extent to which Morsi manages his own Twitter feed isn’t clear.