It didn’t take long after Edward Snowden joined Twitter for the NSA whistleblower to acquire his first Twitter troll: Republican presidential longshot George Pataki.
Pataki, the former three-term governor of New York who has languished at the bottom of polls so far in this presidential campaign, went after Snowden in a series of tweets on Tuesday.
The New York Republican initially greeted Snowden’s arrival by Twitter by calling him “a traitor”.
Some say you have courage, I saw real courage on #Sept11 You are just a traitor who put American lives at risk. https://t.co/RRWtmMzyxE
— George E. Pataki (@GovernorPataki) September 29, 2015
Pataki then went on to call on Twitter to delete Snowden’s account.
.@Twitter is a great American company that should not give a platform to terrorists or traitors - @Jack shutdown @Snowden today.
— George E. Pataki (@GovernorPataki) September 29, 2015
Snowden, who still faces criminal charges in the US resulting from his revelations about government surveillance, did not acknowledge Pataki’s tweets. The whistleblower, who lives in Russia where Vladimir Putin’s government has granted him asylum, engaged in a dialogue with noted astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson instead.
Within six hours of joining Twitter, Snowden had acquired over 629,000 followers on the social media website. In contrast, Pataki, who currently polls under 1% nationally as well as in early states, has 53,000 people following his Twitter account.
