‘She gave me only 30 minutes to comply…’
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) A low-level Twitter moderator recently contacted Sen. Tom Cotton’s office and issued an ultimatum: delete a tweet critical of Black Lives Matter-related riots or the social media giant would permanently lock his account.
Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, made headlines last month after an op-ed he penned appeared in the New York Times. Cotton called on the national guard and active military to back up overwhelmed police forces in cities where Black Lives Matter protests led to riots, looting, arson and violence.
A revolt ensued at the Times with journalists from the news division joining “woke” members of the editorial bureau who together claimed Cotton’s opinion — shared by a supermajority of Americans — had put black lives at risk.
That’s when Twitter came calling — and Cotton refused to back down.
Cotton had tweeted the editorial, and “within a few hours, a low-level employee in Twitter’s Washington office contacted some of my aides at random, claiming that my tweet violated the company’s policies,” he recounted in a new editorial posted on FoxNews.com on Wednesday.
“She gave me only 30 minutes to comply,” he said.
Cotton, 43, unseated an establishment Democrat in 2014 and is a shoo-in for reelection in November. He’s also a decorated Afghanistan war veteran and a Harvard law graduate. Facing off with a Silicon Valley woke functionary was is perhaps a sign of the times.
Cotton and his staff pressed Twitter for an explanation, but they were given different reasons why he was singled-out, some in contrast to others. At one point the moderator said the company took issue with a phrase in his op-ed and follow-up tweet that said, “no quarter.”
“No quarter” is a common expression meant in context to say that looters and violent anarchists should be unable to roam freely in open defiance of the law. But Cotton was told that the expression was taken as a reference that the military would execute urban prisoners of war.
“It was clear, I should add, that this low-level employee was acting as a front for more senior officials at Twitter, whom one might expect would contact directly a sitting senator to discuss such a serious matter,” he said.
“It was equally clear that she avoided putting as much in writing as possible.”
Cotton refused to delete his tweet, and two hours later the moderator called back and said the social media company would take no action against his account.
“Twitter began as an open platform committed to the free exchange of ideas; over time, it increasingly has taken upon itself the role of politically correct censor of thought-crime by elected officials and ordinary citizens alike,” Cotton said.
“Not surprisingly, the censorship falls overwhelmingly on conservatives,” he added.
Notably, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey unfollowed the New York Times Opinion Twitter account after it published Cotton’s original op-ed.