Responding to Twitter release, former Minnesota GOP candidate calls for 'bullets'
Former Minnesota GOP congressional candidate Shukri Abdirahman posted a call for "bullets" in response to newly released internal documents from Twitter.
Abdirahman, who launched a bid for the GOP nomination to face Ilhan Omar in Minnesota's 5th Congressional District earlier this year, has stoked controversy and garnered national headlines for her tweet.
"We can no longer get rid of tyranny with ballots. It's only by bullets now," the tweet read.
Abdirahman's tweet came in response to author Matt Taibbi, who posted a thread on behalf of Twitter owner Elon Musk regarding the social media platform's decision in 2020 to throttle access to a story of dubious provenance by the New York Post about the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of then presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The article made unverified claims that Hunter Biden had tried to arrange a meeting between his father Joe Biden and a Ukrainian executive at a company he was working for in 2015.
The decision to restrict access to it on Twitter was reversed a few days later, according to the Washington Post, with Taibbi's thread showing internal debate within Twitter about the decision to remove the article.
Since much of this had been previously reported, the focus from Taibbi's thread has been the seemingly new revelation that requests were made by the Biden team to remove a series of links that were being shared on Twitter, which it has emerged led to illegally posted nude images of Hunter Biden.
Musk dubbed the release the of these documents the “Twitter Files” and claimed it would demonstrate “free speech suppression” at the company.
Conservatives have leapt on Taibbi's thread as evidence of First Amendment violations and political involvement in Twitter even though Twitter is a private company, the images contravened Twitter's terms-of-service as they had been obtained and shared non-consensually, and Joe Biden was not a member of the government at the time.
Taibbi's same thread mentioned that the-then Trump White House also flagged certain tweets, which were "received and honored" by Twitter.
Abdirahman also called the actions by Twitter "treason" and the "real insurrection," referring to the Jan. 6., 2021 efforts by a right-wing group of protesters to overthrow the presidential election.
Abdirahman, who previously served in the U.S. Army and like Omar is a Somali refugee, ultimately did not appear on the Republican primary ballot in August. Omar went on to defeat opponent Cicely Davis with almost 75% of the vote in November.
