SILICON VALLEY — U.S. companies are providing services to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on social media.<br /><br />As we've said before, U.S. Treasury sanctions, specifically Executive Order 13582 prohibit American companies from providing services to Syria without obtaining a license from the Treasury Department. Do they have a license? We don't know. They may well have. If they don't, they could be breaking U.S. law.<br /><br />Bashar al-Assad's propaganda channel was removed from YouTube not long after we reported on it last month. <br /><br />Yesterday our further reporting Syrian government and media appearing on the platform garnered no comment from the U.S. government or Google, YouTube's parent company.<br /><br />The Syrian dictator has accounts on U.S. sites Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Syria's Permanent Mission for the United Nations links to Assad's Facebook and Twitter accounts — not to mention that now dead YouTube account and that Facebook page, links to the Assad on the Instagram.
