Twitter's safety team allowed a user to stay on its platform despite death threats he made against former President Barack Obama, reports Forbes.
"I will kill Barack Hussein Obama until death in a field of battle," the man wrote in one tweet earlier this year, according to a search warrant reviewed by the news outlet, adding in another, "United States Secret Service are going to kill me."
The man admitted to making the threats but didn't get booted from Twitter despite CEO Elon Musk's hard line on calls to violence. The tweets were removed from the platform.
"Death threats should result in immediate account suspension. Lmk if that's not happening," Musk wrote in a tweet this February.
An ex-staffer who worked in the trust and safety division at Twitter told Forbes Musk has weakened the company's policy on death threats since he took over the tech giant last year.
"Violent threats are a good canary in a coal mine, because they're so obviously indefensible and also something Twitter has historically prioritized and taken action on very rapidly," the person said.
Other users have complained of death threats receiving no action, including soccer stars Gary Lineker and Sergio Ramos and video game developer Brianna Wu.
"I'm the Brianna Wu from Gamergate. There are probably very few people that have reported more death threats to Twitter than I have. So unfortunately, I have a kind of expertise in their ability to process these," said Wu, who worked with Twitter's trust and safety team in the aftermath of the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate, which began in 2014 as a backlash against female critics of the gaming industry and included misogynistic attacks and death threats.
"It has never been worse," she added.
"Is there even a point to reporting a death threat if it's not acted on until a week later? You're trying to get rid of bad actors from the platform. But it stays up. People get to see it. They get the effect they are going for, publicly threatening you."
Twitter safety team head Ella Irwin did not respond to a request for comments from Forbes.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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