Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, on Wednesday said Twitter threatened to permanently lock his account over recent posts tied to the ongoing unrest following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police last month.
Mr. Cotton has attracted significant attention for defending the president’s authority to leverage U.S. troops, if necessary, to quell violent rioting and looting that emanated from some of the protests following Floyd’s death.
“So one of their low-level employees in Washington, D.C., just contacted my office out of the blue and said you have to delete these tweets in 30 minutes or we’re going to permanently lock your account,” Mr. Cotton said on “Fox & Friends.”
He said they asked for an explanation but that “it was not really forthcoming.”
“They cited a policy that didn’t really explain or apply to my situation,” Mr. Cotton said. “We sent them back some clear evidence of my meaning on Twitter and then they said well, we’re going to consider this.”
“And we waited them out. We called their bluff for 30 minutes. They didn’t lock down my account, and then within about two hours they finally got back to us and said, ’OK, you can keep your post up,’ ” he said.
Mr. Cotton said the whole procedure struck him as secretive and unfair.
“They were just calling us out of the blue demanding that we censor my own tweets or that they would censor my entire account,” he said.
Mr. Cotton said one of his offending phrases was: “No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.”
“This was apparently too much for the professional umbrage-takers on Twitter,” he wrote in a piece for Fox News. “In high dudgeon, they exclaimed that ’no quarter’ once meant that a military force would take no prisoners, but instead shoot them.”
The senator noted that the phrase is now a common metaphor for taking a tough approach to something.
A Twitter spokesperson said the tweet was reported to the company.
“Our teams reviewed it within the context in which it was shared, as is standard, and determined it didn’t violate our rules,” the spokesperson said. “We apply the Twitter Rules impartially to every account on our service.”
Company staff did reach out to Mr. Cotton’s office.
Mr. Cotton’s recent op-ed in The New York Times defending the president’s authority to use military force to quell the riots generated criticism from reporters at the paper and ultimately resulted in the resignation of the paper’s editorial page editor.
There is now an editor’s note on the piece online saying the essay “fell short of our standards and should not have been published.”
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