A group of activists began broadcasting messages on Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters Tuesday evening, calling on the site to ban President Donald Trump just hours after he threatened North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over the size of his “nuclear button.”
The group, Resistance SF, continued to display those messages Wednesday, with some reading “Be a hero: Ban Trump,” “Endangers the world” and “Trump’s dog whistle” with an arrow pointing to the company’s logo.
Another reading “Trump or @jack must go” appeared to call for the resignation of the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey.
“Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, has enabled @realDonaldTrump from his first dog whistles in the birther movement to his latest nuclear pissing contest,” the group wrote on a Facebook event for the action on Wednesday. “Twitter is endangering the world and breaking its own terms of service to do it. Trump or Jack must go.”
The group also launched a campaign using the hashtag #JackIsComplicit.
HuffPost has reached out to Twitter for comment.
Twitter on Wednesday responded to an outcry over Trump’s North Korea tweet, in which the president taunted Kim and said the United States had a “Nuclear Button” that was “much bigger & more powerful” than Kim’s.
The company told The Hill that Trump’s tweet did not violate its terms of service because it was not a “specific threat.” Twitter’s policy bans “specific threats of violence or wish for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people.”
The company also defended a similar Trump tweet in September in which the president first called Kim “Little Rocket Man,” with Twitter saying it considered ”‘newsworthiness’ and whether a Tweet is of public interest” before taking it down. Dorsey himself has said that all Twitter users are held to the same rules, but he told Wired last year that it was “important” to “maintain open channels to our leaders, whether we like what they’re saying or not.”
The group organizing this week’s protest didn’t appear to appreciate that explanation.
“Twitter had the audacity to say Trump’s escalation with North Korea didn’t violate their policies because it [wants] a threat,” the group wrote Wednesday evening. “If you don’t think teetering toward World War III is a threat then you’re probably named Jack Dorsey.”
As BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz noted, the night’s messages also included projections reading “History is watching” and “A tweet starts WWIII?”