Sen. Ted Cruz called on the Justice and Treasury Departments on Friday to launch a criminal investigate into Twitter over allegations that the social media platform may be violating U.S. sanction laws against Iran, Axios reports.
The Republican lawmaker from Texas wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin asking for a probe into whether Twitter's decision to allow Iranian leaders to have official accounts on the platform is against the law.
Cruz wrote that Twitter’s decision to permit Iranian leaders to use the social media site could be considered a service provided by the company. Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), American companies are not allowed to provide goods or services to Iran’s leaders. In 2019, President Donald Trump also signed an executive order that put sanctions in place against high-ranking Iranian officials.
Cruz stated that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif have used their Twitter accounts “to post anti-American disinformation and conspiracy theories, not authoritative health information.”
“They use their accounts provided by Twitter to threaten and taunt their enemies real and imagined,” Cruz said of Iran’s leaders.
In February, Cruz and several other Republican senators wrote a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey requesting he remove Khamenei and Zarif’s Twitter accounts. The letter suggested the accounts could be classified as a service and therefore violated the law.
Twitter rejected the senator’s request in a response sent on April 3.
Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde told the senators that Iran’s leaders were allowed to use the site because it is “a tool of communication,” which makes it exempt from sanction laws.
Gadde also stated that Iran’s leaders were part of a “public conversation” about the coronavirus, adding that the accounts would not be removed during the pandemic.
Cruz cited part of Trump’s executive order to defend his argument that Twitter is not exempt from any sanction laws. The order states that any American company that “provided technological support for, or goods or services to” Iran’s leaders was in violation of the law.
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