During a speech Monday at the Anti-Defamation League’s conference in Washington, D.C., FBI Director James Comey said that it is important to protect Americans’ right to use Twitter since free speech is a vital right in the United States.
“Some of you may have read recently that I’m on Twitter. I’m not a tweeter,” Comey told the audience. “I am there to listen, to read, especially what’s being said about the FBI and its mission. Sometimes it’s a wonderful place. Sometimes it’s a depressing place. Sometimes it feels like I’m all of a sudden immediately in every dive bar in America, where I can hear everybody screaming at the television set.”
“But it is free speech. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to agree with it, but we have to protect it because it is the bedrock of this great country,” he continued. “That we can believe and say what we want, no matter how distasteful or how disruptive, it’s a vital right in this amazing country of ours.”
But Comey warned that often hateful speech foments into action, which he said the country must work to prevent.
“You know all too well that in a heartbeat, words can turn to violence. Because hate doesn’t remain static too often,” he said. “An opinion, a prejudice, a dislike sometimes foments, sometimes it festers, and it can grow into something far more dangerous. Sometimes, too often, hate becomes hate crime. So we have to do everything in our power to stop those people who move from stewing to acting, who move from just hating to hurting.”
The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks hate crimes, issued a report in late April that found anti-Semitic attacks in the U.S. increased by 34 percent in 2016 and are set to increase even more in 2017.
The group also found that Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, was the target of anti-Semitic tweets around the time that the United States launched a missile strike in Syria and Kushner’s reported rival Steve Bannon was removed from the National Security Council’s Principal’s Committee.
