In the wee hours of the morning, when President Trump predictably dumped a truck worth of gasoline on the volatile situation in Minneapolis, Twitter took the extraordinary step of hiding the tweet with a disclaimer saying it violated rules against “glorifying violence.”
There shouldn’t be much debate that in the midst of a riot in a major American city, it is beyond atrocious for Trump to tweet “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in the context of talking about sending in the military. And, as a private entity, Twitter should be allowed to set whatever rules it wants for policing content, even if it applies those rules arbitrarily.
Having said that, now that Twitter has crossed the line into fact-checking and screening tweets that it determines to be “glorifying violence,” it is going to find itself in a very difficult position.
If Trump is not allowed to use inflammatory language in which the most straightforward interpretation is that he’s talking about gunning down rioters, then how, exactly, is the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, allowed unmoderated use of Twitter?
Khamenei has used the platform to advance Holocaust denial:
#Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it’s uncertain how it has happened.
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) March 21, 2014
To advocate terrorism:
5. My main advice is to continue this struggle & better organize anti-occupation organizations, cooperation & expand the areas of #Jihad inside Palestinian territories. Everyone must help the Palestinian fighters. We will proudly do everything in our power on this path.
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) May 22, 2020
And to call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which he calls a “cancerous growth”:
4. The Zionist regime is a deadly, cancerous growth and a detriment to this region. It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed. Then, the shame will fall on those who put their facilities at the service of normalization of relations with this regime.
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) May 22, 2020
It’s one thing to have a wide-open policy in which people can post whatever they want on Twitter, allowing for some to post lies and calls for violence while other users get to push back against them and fact check. I, for one, believe there is value in seeing the unfettered thoughts of a madman denying the Holocaust while calling for another one — especially one who Democrats portray as somebody worth cutting a deal with and deserving of sanctions relief.
But once Twitter crosses over into the realm of saying it is going to slap a warning label on Trump, there’s no way it’s defensible to allow Khamenei to call for terrorism and mass extermination of Jews without any filter.
