GOP’s Tom Cotton Says Twitter Threatened to Lock Account Over Tweet

(Bloomberg) -- Republican Senator Tom Cotton said a “low-level” Twitter Inc. employee called his office several weeks ago and threatened to permanently lock his account unless he deleted a tweet that advocated using the military to quell unrest throughout the U.S. and used the term “no quarter.”

“We asked for an explanation of why that was and it was not really forthcoming. They cited a policy that didn’t apply to my situation,” Cotton said in Fox News interview early Wednesday.

In the tweet, Cotton advocated using the U.S. military to back up police if they were outnumbered during protests following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in Minnesota while a police officer had a knee on his neck.

“No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” Cotton said in the tweet.

The phrase has subsequently been the subject of controversy, with some saying that it means to take no prisoners. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the term this way: “no pity or mercy -- used to say that an enemy, opponent, etc., is treated in a very harsh way. The soldiers showed/gave no quarter to the enemy.”

Cotton said he ultimately won the standoff with the Twitter employee. He sent back “clear evidence” of the meaning of his Twitter post and Twitter officials said they would consider it.

“We waited them out, we called their bluff, for 30 minutes they didn’t lock down my account and within about 2 hours they got back to us and said, ‘OK, you can keep your posts up,’” Cotton said.

Twitter said the tweet was “reported to Twitter and our teams reviewed it within the context in which it was shared, as is standard, and determined it didn’t violate our rules,” according to a spokesperson. “We apply the Twitter rules impartially to every account on our service.”

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