Twitter briefly suspended the personal account of US senator Mike Lee after the Utah Republican appeared to the threat the prime minister of Japan over a detained US Navy serviceman.
“My personal Twitter account – @BasedMikeLee – has been suspended,” Senator Lee wrote from his official account on Tuesday. “Twitter did not alert me ahead of time, nor have they yet offered an explanation for the suspension. My team and I are seeking answers.”
The Independent has contacted Twitter for comment.
Earlier in the day, Mr Lee wrote multiple messages to Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida on his personal account regarding detained US Navy lieutenant Ridge Alkonis.
"Hand Lt. Alkonis over to U.S. custody immediately," one tweet read.
"If you don’t hand him over in the next seven hours, a series of conversations will begin tomorrow to inform Americans of how poorly you’re treating our military personnel—not just Ridge Alkonis, but all 55,000 U.S. forces in Japan," another said.
“You’ve made your choice,” the senator later wrote. “I hope you’re ready for some conversations on the Senate floor that you’re not likely to enjoy. This issue isn’t going away, and neither am I.”
The Independent has contacted Senator Lee for comment.
The @BasedMikeLee account was later restored on Wednesday.
“Thanks to all who assisted in operation #Free@basedMikeLee,” the senator wrote. “Still no explanation from @Twitter as to what happened.”
Lieutenant Alkonis was sentenced to three years in prison for causing a fatal car crash in 2021.
Senator Lee has previously accused social media sites including Twitter of bias against conservatives, after Facebook tagged one of his posts about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election and added additional fact-checking infromation.
“The tag to me sounds a whole lot more like state-run media announcing the party line rather than a neutral company, as it purports to be, running an open online forum,” Mr Lee said in 2020 during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. “This kind of editorializing insulates people from the truth and it insinuates that anyone concerned about voter fraud must be crazy.”
In fact, Twitter may be biased in the opposite direction. A University of Pennsylvania study in 2022 found that the site gives greater visbility to conservative news.
A study from MIT, Yale and the University of Exeter that same year found that Twitter does in fact suspend more Republicans than Democrats, but that’s likely because they are more likely to spread false or misleading information that violate’s the social network’s terms of service.
