The acting Homeland Security Secretary, Chad Wolf, penned a letter this week to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in which he slammed the social media giant for “censorship” which he argued “poses a threat to our security.”
Mr Wolf sent the letter after Twitter suspended the account of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan. Mr Morgan was suspended shortly after tweeting about the success of the Trump Administration’s border wall along the US-Mexico frontier.
Mr Morgan said that the wall was doing a good job in preventing “gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drugs” from entering the United States. He added that, “it’s a fact, walls work.”
Twitter temporarily then suspended the account, citing violations of its policy against “hateful conduct.”
The ban has since been lifted following what Twitter described as a “further evaluation from our team.”
However, the dispute did not end there. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Wolf waded in by writing a scathing letter that has been sent to Twitter’s top man, Mr Dorsey.
“I write to you about Twitter’s recent censorship of Mark Morgan, the Senior Official Performing the Duties of Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)… Not only was Twitter’s act of censorship unjustified—the tweet is supported by data—it is disturbing. As the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other Federal agencies continue to rely on Twitter to share important information with the U.S. public, your censorship poses a threat to our security,” Mr Wolf wrote.
Further on in the letter, Mr Wolf writes that, “the fact that the tweet was removed and the account locked is startling… It is hard to understand how anyone believed Mr. Morgan’s tweet promoted violence, threats or harassment. Especially considering that the facts about the border wall system support the tweet.”
“Whether you know it or not, CBP guards the front line of the American homeland. CBP repels and arrests thousands of violent criminal gang members each year. CBP rescues young girls who are forced into cross-border sex trafficking. CBP intercepts dangerous drugs and contraband, including enough of the opioid fentanyl to kill every man, woman, and child in the United States several times over,” Wolf elaborated.
Mr Wolf called it “dangerous and damaging” for a publisher to “arbitrarily” decide that a president’s policies are tantamount to “violence” in order to “censor them.”
Wolf finished with a very stern warning, telling Mr Dorsey to “never again” censor content in a way that obstructs “Americans’ unalienable right to communicate with each other and their government and its officials.”
This latest incident comes hot on the heels of a recent decision by Twitter to lift the suspension of the account of The New York Post after the latter published a story on October 14 that purportedly showed an email of Hunter Biden communicating with a Ukrainian official about meetings with his father, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, back when he was Vice President in the Obama Administration.
Some saw the suspension as an attempt by Twitter to shield Joe Biden’s campaign from critical coverage at a time when the Democrat appears to be leading President Trump in the election race by an average of 10 points nationwide.
