Ilhan Omar Got A Call From Twitter CEO After Threats
At least twice in the last two weeks, men have been arrested for directing death threats at Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, including a man from Florida who, per The Inquisitr, also threatened several other Democrat officials.
Some supporters of the freshman Congresswoman have tied the threats to a video posted to Twitter earlier this month by President Trump, who implied that some comments by Omar had minimized the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Now, the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has addressed the matter with the Congresswoman.
Per a Washington Post story that was reprinted by The St. Paul Pioneer Press, Dorsey called Rep. Omar this week to explain Twitter’s decision to not delete the Trump tweet.
In the phone call, per “a person familiar with the conversation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the call was private,” the Congresswoman asked why Trump’s tweet was not removed. The CEO replied that the tweet was not in any way in violation of Twitter’s user rules.
And while Dorsey told Rep. Omar that the video had been shared far beyond Twitter, meaning that deleting it would likely be fruitless, he admitted that his company “needed to do a better job generally in removing hate and harassment from the site.”
The phone call came the same week that Dorsey met, in person, with Trump at the White House. per The Inquisitr, the president asked Dorsey about bias against him on the platform and why he has lost followers, while the CEO told him that the losses are almost entirely due to bot purges. Trump has also reportedly complained to associates of late that he has fewer followers than former President Barack Obama.
NEW: Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey phoned Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar on Tuesday and stood by the company’s decision to permit a tweet from President Trump that later resulted in a flood of death threats targeting the congresswoman. https://t.co/TEdwwJKVbT
— Yashar Ali ? ????? (@yashar) April 25, 2019
Trump has never been banned or suspended from Twitter, nor have any of his tweets ever been deleted by the social media platform, although the president’s account was briefly removed in late 2017, reportedly by a rogue Twitter employee, per CNBC.
The president’s heavy usage of Twitter has been a major topic throughout his presidency, as Trump has used the social media platform to do everything from live-tweeting Fox News shows, to threatening North Korea, to announcing the departures of cabinet officials, in some cases before notifying them himself.
In addition, per Axios, courts have ruled that Trump may not block Twitter users, and court decisions have gone against him due to his tweets. Trump’s Twitter messages were also cited repeatedly in the Mueller Report.
