Twitter briefly suspended US Senator Mike Lee’s personal account after the Utah Republican appeared to threaten Japan’s prime minister over a detained US Navy serviceman. “My personal Twitter account, @BasedMikeLee, has been suspended,” Senator Lee wrote on Tuesday from his official account. “Twitter did not notify me in advance, nor have they provided an explanation for the suspension. My team and I are seeking answers.” The Independent has reached out to Twitter for comment. Earlier in the day, Mr Lee used his personal account to send multiple messages to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida about detained US Navy lieutenant Ridge Alkonis.
“Hand over Lt. Alkonis to US custody immediately,” one tweet said. “If you don’t hand him over in the next seven hours, a series of conversations will start tomorrow to inform Americans about how poorly you’re treating our military personnel—not just Ridge Alkonis, but all 55,000 US forces in Japan,” another said. “You’ve made your decision,” the senator wrote later. “I hope you’re ready for some conversations on the Senate floor that you’re not likely to enjoy.
Senator Lee has been contacted by the Independent for comment. On Wednesday, the @BasedMikeLee account was restored. “Thank you to everyone who helped with operation #Free@basedMikeLee,” the senator wrote. “There has still been no explanation from @Twitter as to what happened.” Lieutenant Alkonis was given a three-year sentence in prison for provoking a fatal car crash in 2021.
Senator Lee has previously accused social media platforms such as Twitter of being biased against republicans, after Facebook labelled one of his posts about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and provided extra fact-checking information.’
“The tag sounds to me 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 during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2020. “This type of editorializing shields people from the truth and implies that anyone concerned about voter fraud is insane.” Twitter, in fact, may be biased in the opposite direction. In 2022, a University of Pennsylvania study discovered that the site gives conservative news more visibility.
A study published the same year by MIT, Yale, and the University of Exeter discovered that Twitter suspends more Republicans than Democrats, but this is likely because they are more likely to spread inaccurate or deceptive data that violates the social network’s terms of service.
