by Chris White
Twitter is refusing to pull down a President Donald Trump’s tweet threatening future strikes against Iran despite calls from an Obama-era official to do something about the president’s account.
“The Tweets are not in violation of the Twitter Rules,” Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough said Monday in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. She was referring to a Jan. 4 tweet from Trump in which he warned of future actions if Iran responded to his Jan. 3 airstrike against Gen. Qasem Soleimani.
“We have … targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!” Trump wrote that addressed Iran’s potential retaliation.
Twitter should do something about Trump’s tweets, according to Katie Jacobs Stanton, a former Obama-era official and Twitter executive.
“When I worked at Twitter, we thought it was a good idea for world leaders to have a platform to speak directly to constituents,” she wrote in a Sunday tweet. “The use case of announcing and/or threatening war is an outrageous abuse of the platform and most importantly, the Constitution.”
When I worked at Twitter, we thought it was a good idea for world leaders to have a platform to speak directly to constituents.
The use case of announcing and/or threatening war is an outrageous abuse of the platform and most importantly, the Constitution. https://t.co/o9KuYMQFCg
— Katie Jacobs Stanton (@KatieS) January 6, 2020
Along with being a Obama administration alum, Stanton also worked at Twitter between 2010 and 2016. She was appointed to a special advisory position at the U.S. State Department in 2010 during President Barack Obama’s first term.
Another former Twitter employee weighed in on the tweets. “At Twitter, we used to dream about the possibilities for governing and diplomacy through the service. This is not what we had in mind,” Jim Prosser, a former Twitter spokesman, said in a tweet Sunday. Twitter often wrestles with how to handle Trump’s tweets.
Twitter announced in June that the company will start labeling and down ranking politicians’ most vitriolic tweets. The label applies to all verified political candidates and officials with more than 100,000 followers, Twitter noted in a blog post. Users who want to view flagged content must click on a screen that says Twitter’s rules against abusive behavior apply to the tweet.
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Chris White is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
