Twitter flags Joe Arpaio’s US Senate campaign page as potentially unsafe
Jun 21, 2018, 1:30 PM | Updated: 9:32 pm
(AP Photo/Matt York)
PHOENIX — The website for former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s U.S. Senate campaign might be unsafe — if you are to believe Twitter’s warning.
Clicking the link from Arpaio’s Twitter profile to his campaign page Thursday brought up this message from the social media site:
There’s no indication of how long the warning has been active or what specifically could be harmful if you want to click from Twitter to www.sheriffjoeforamerica.com.
The warning says the site “has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful or associated with a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service.”
There were no warnings on the links from Twitter to the campaign websites of his Republican primary opponents, U.S. Rep. Martha McSally and former Arizona state Sen. Kelli Ward.
Twitter has been accused in recent years of liberal favoritism in how it suspends and bans accounts for violating its terms of service and hands out its coveted verification check marks.
Twitter’s help center says seeing an unsafe link warning “means the URL matches a database of potentially harmful URLs which may lead to phishing, malware, or spam sites or sites associated with a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service.”
It also says somebody whose website has been flagged should contact Twitter support.
The address flagged by Twitter is for Arpaio’s official campaign page, as listed on the Arizona Secretary of State website.
Like any campaign website, it contains information about volunteering or donating, the candidate’s stance on certain issues and news updates.
What’s missing is a follow-up to a tweet by Arpaio from Tuesday that alleged “suspicious activity regarding FBI Infiltration [sic] of me.”
Tomorrow I will be putting out a press release that shows suspicious activity regarding FBI Infiltration of me.
— Sheriff Joe Arpaio (@RealSheriffJoe) June 19, 2018
If a recent poll is any indication, the controversial former sheriff is a long shot to win the GOP nomination in the race to replace outgoing U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake.
An OH Predictive Insights poll released this week said McSally was favored by 39 percent of likely voters. Ward was the preference of 24.5 percent, while Arpaio’s support was at 13.8 percent. Nearly a quarter of respondents — 22.4 percent — were undecided.
That was a big swing from April polling, which had Ward at 36 percent, McSally at 27 percent and Arpaio at 22 percent.