Jewish students in France have launched legal action to force Twitter to reveal the details of people who posted a slew of antisemitic messages.

The Union of Jewish Students said it had already forced the social networking site to remove slurs appearing under the hashtags ‘#unbonjuif’ and ‘#unjuifmort’ — meaning “a good Jew” and “a dead Jew”.

A spokesman for Twitter said that the company “does not mediate content… If we are alerted to content that may be in violation of our terms of service, we will investigate each report and respond according to our policies.”