PARIS – Twitter agreed to pull racist and anti-Semitic tweets under a pair of French hash tags after a Jewish group threatened to sue the social network for running afoul of national laws against hate speech, the organization said.

The decision came a day after Twitter bowed to German law and blocked an account of a banned neo-Nazi group there.

The freewheeling social network is increasingly running up against European anti-discrimination laws, many of which date to the aftermath of the Holocaust by governments that acknowledged the contribution of years of hate speech to the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews. Friday’s action could mark a new stage for the company that has famously refused efforts to police its millions of users.

But it’s not entirely clear how the social network planned to carry out the agreement, or in what timeframe.

“Twitter does not mediate content,” the company said in a statement. “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 the policies and procedures outlined in our support pages.”

The company’s policies require international users to comply with local laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content. They also ban any content with direct threats of violence.

The French Union of Jewish Students, which planned to supply Twitter with a list of the offensive tweets to be pulled, said it would still file a formal complaint against the social network to bring the tweeters to justice.

The anti-Semitic tweets included slurs and photos evoking the Holocaust, including one of a pile of ash and another of an emaciated Holocaust victim.