Twitter says it supports freedom of expression after threat against Harry Potter author

Discovery said the company supports freedom of expression after a threat against the Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. Rowling shared a screenshot Saturday of a Twitter reply to her tweet wishing fellow author Salman Rushdie well after a man stabbed him in the neck at a New York lecture hall on Friday. She wrote that she felt sick over Rushdie being attacked and hoped that he would recover.

"Don't worry about who's next," a user said.

Rowling said that she determined no violations were found, and shared a screenshot of the message from Twitter. Others shared that the tweet and Twitter had substantiated that its community guidelines were violated.

Discovery, which owns the rights to Rowling's Harry Potter franchise, said it stands with her and all authors' rights to express themselves.

The company said that WBD believes in freedom of expression, peaceful discourse and supporting those who offer their views in the public arena. Our thoughts are with Sir Salman Rushdie and his family after the senseless act of violence in New York. It does not appear that the tweet is still online, but the user's account responded to Rowling's public request for Twitter support.

The user wrote on Sunday that they recovered their account after heavy reports and questioned how they could threaten her life in Pakistan. They wrote that their comment was an indication of others who live in the United Kingdom.

There was no immediate response from Twitter to a request for comment on the situation Sunday.

Rushdie's agent said Sunday that the author was off a ventilator and was on the road to recovery after being stabbed in the neck Friday morning at the Chautauqua Institution. The author has been the subject of threats for decades after his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses drew the ire of some Muslims and was banned in Iran.

The stabbing suspect was identified as 24-year-old Hadi Matar of Fairview, New Jersey. A preliminary review of his social media shows he sympathies for Shia extremism and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation.

It is not clear what motivated the Twitter user's threat against Rowling.

The author of Harry Potter has been criticized for her views on transgender women in recent years, with many calling her TERF, or a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Some people have criticized some of her famous Harry Potter characters as problematic, including goblin bankers who embody anti-Semitic stereotypes.