Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner focused his questioning in today's Section 230 hearing on Twitter, pressing Jack Dorsey on whether Twitter has policies prohibiting Holocaust denialism.
"Somebody deny[ing] the Holocaust has happened is not misinformation?" Gardner asked the Twitter CEO.
"It's misleading information, but we don't have a policy against that type of misleading information," Dorsey replied.
But that's not quite true. Earlier this month, Twitter told Bloomberg that the company would remove Holocaust denial posts under its hateful conduct policy, which prohibits attempts to "deny or diminish" violent events. "We also have a robust glorification of violence policy in place and take action against content that glorifies or praises historical acts of violence and genocide, including the Holocaust," a Twitter spokesperson told Protocol Wednesday.
Gardner's line of questioning was prompted by tweets from Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei that call for "the elimination of the Zionist regime," but did not directly deny that the Holocaust happened. Gardner asked Dorsey why Twitter had left the Ayatollah's tweets untouched, but had attached warning labels to another tweet, in which President Trump threatened to shoot looters following the killing of George Floyd by police. According to Dorsey, the Ayatollah's tweets didn't violate Twitter's policies, while Trump's did. "We consider them saber rattling, which is part of the speech world leaders of world leaders in concert with other countries," Dorsey said of the Ayatollah's tweets. "Speech against our own people, or a country's own citizens, we believe, is different and can cause more immediate harm."