What Will Elon Musk Do About the Twitter Account of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khemenei?

Elon Musk says he wants to provide on his newly acquired Twitter “free speech that matches the law.” So what would he do with speech that is not only genocidal but might also violate American law? Case in point: Twitter user Khamenei_Ir.This morning the account owner, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khemenei of Iran, went on a tweetstorm to mark Quds day. The annual event on the last Friday of Ramadan was invented by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 with the goal of uniting world Muslims around al Quds — Jerusalem’s Arabic name — and the idea of eradicating the Jewish state.To highlight that goal, the current ayatollah-in-chief has for several days used Twitter to promote the event. Today he fired off as many as 21 tweets, including this one: “Some Arab govts have asked US to accelerate solving the Palestinian issue. If by that they mean U.S. should remove obstacles in the way of the Zionist regime, before it leaves the region, then they have been 1stly traitorous & 2ndly naïve because the blind can’t lead the blind!”Mr. Khamenei’s consistent calls for erasing the Jewish state from the map prompted the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs committee in 2012, Howard Berman, to call for sanctioning the ayatollah. On Quds day, Mr. Berman wrote, “Khamenei called for unity ‘to remove the Zionist black stain from human society.’” Mr. Berman added that Iran’s leader was cchoing Nazi Germany, in that, “Khamenei had stated that there is ‘justification to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel.’”On its face, advocating genocide should violate Twitter rules. Yet it might also violate American sanctions: In 2019 President Trump issued Executive Order 12957, imposing sanctions on anyone providing services in America for Mr. Khamenei, as well as other Iranian officials connected to the supreme leader.Two years ago, Senators Cruz, Cotton, Blackburn, and Rubio sent a letter to Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, alerting him to that law, and calling on the website to stop providing services to the ayatollah.“Regardless of the political agenda of a particular nation state,” replied Mr. Dorsey, “to deny our service to their leaders at a time like this would be antithetical to the purpose of our company.” Yet, Twitter did then briefly suspend the ayatollah’s account. On January 8, 2021, the company flagged a tweet in which Mr. Khamenei dubbed American- and British-made Covid vaccines “completely untrustworthy” and called on his nearly 895,000 followers to avoid them. Shortly after Twitter temporarily suspended the Iranian head of state’s account, it also canceled the account of the American president, and did so permanently. “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account,” the website owners announced, “we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”As a result of the January 6, 2021, events, Mr. Trump was forever barred from using Twitter, while Ayatollah Khemenei now remains free to promote violence and genocide on the platform. Mr. Musk’s announcement that he would make Twitter algorithms open to public scrutiny might help clarify the rationale behind making such seemingly conflicting determinations. Those decisions include not only account suspensions, but ones about tweets that users would be warned about as potentially offensive. Mr. Khamenei’s Quds day tweets do not carry such warnings.In contrast, Twitter — which has suspended the Babylon Bee account — tagged as “sensitive material” a tweet issued by the satirical website’s editor in chief, Kyle Mann. Mr. Mann’s tweet linked to a video from the conservative-leaning website that depicted a fictional Twitter executive crying over Mr. Musk’s purchase of the site. Apparently, making fun of Twitter executives proved more “sensitive” than calling for the eradication of an entire country. Meanwhile, as Mr. Khamenei tweets freely, other Iranian citizens are banned by the supreme leader’s regime from using the platform. Mr. Cruz cited that anomaly in a letter he sent two years ago to the attorney general at the time, William Barr, and the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.In his letter, the senator of Texas also alerted the two executives to Twitter’s refusal “to come into compliance with United States law.” He called on the justice and treasury departments to investigate “what appears to be Twitter’s blatant and willful violation” of the executive order that barred Americans from providing services to Mr. Khamenei. Mr. Musk’s intention to make public the rules that ban some, but not others, from using Twitter — which he calls the “de facto public town square” — is welcomed by free speech advocates. Yet, the executive order sanctioning Ayatollah Khamenei remains on the books, so in this case Mr. Musk may need to carefully examine if his libertarian tendencies comply with American law.

What Will Elon Musk Do About the Twitter Account of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khemenei?

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