Former Intel Chief Urges Congress to Investigate Twitter After Iran Uses Platform to Threaten US
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Twitter executives are refusing to comment after Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei used the platform to say his regime “definitely” still planned to retaliate against Americans for the January killing of Qasem Soleimani.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran will never forget the martyrdom of Hajj Qasem Soleimani and will definitely strike a reciprocal blow to the US,” Khamenei tweeted on Tuesday.
Soleimani was the leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization in 2019. Soleimani was killed by a U.S. drone strike in January during a covert visit to Baghdad, where officials said he was helping insurgents to plan attacks against American troops.
Ric Grenell, who served as director of national intelligence from February until the end of May this year, referenced the threat in a Wednesday message directed at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, asking, “Does this sound like ‘offline harm’?”
Grenell — who is gay — used stronger language in another message. “The murderer, sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic Iranian Regime Leader @khamenei_ir is still here,” Grenell wrote. “@Jack, your research team is terrible.”
Twitter’s failure to take action prompts questions about how the platform enforces its policies. The company in May placed a warning label on a tweet from President Donald Trump in which the president called for the mayor of Minneapolis to “get his act together” with respect to protesters in the city, writing, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The label said the tweet violated “Twitter rules about glorifying violence.”
Twitter took the same action in June, when it appended the label to a tweet from the president that said protesters would be “met with serious force” if they attempted to set up an “autonomous zone” in Washington, D.C. Twitter said in a statement at the time, “We’ve placed a public interest notice on this Tweet for violating our policy against abusive behavior, specifically, the presence of a threat of harm against an identifiable group.”
The company said in 2019 that it would start labeling tweets from political leaders who violated the platform’s rules. To date, the company has labeled at least two other Trump tweets for sharing information the company said it didn’t view as accurate, but has applied similar labels to messages from just one other official, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao. The company said in May that it annotated two of Lijian’s tweets claiming the U.S. Army might be responsible for the coronavirus pandemic.
On Thursday, Grenell told Mediaite that Twitter was allowing foreign leaders to use the platform to promote violence, and that Congress should look into the issue.
“Twitter not only has arbitrarily-applied rules, their supposed speech protection rules to guard against harm are completely phony,” Grenell said. “The platform is used by terrorists around the world and regime leaders who deny their people access to social media while spewing hate and violence themselves.”
“The real issue right now is why Congress ignores Twitter’s manipulation,” he added. “Where are the politicians who are charged with protecting us from companies manipulating the market?”
The president signed an executive order in May asking the Federal Communications Commission to review Twitter’s protection from liability for messages shared on the platform, though it isn’t clear whether the FCC will conclude that review before this year’s election.
