Following the protest at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, several voices from the Left, including Michelle Obama and the Anti-Defamation League, pressured then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to remove President Donald Trump from the platform, according to the fourth installation of the Twitter Files, published Saturday by independent author Michael Shellenberger.
Because Dorsey was on vacation, he “delegated much of the handling of the situation” to senior Twitter executives at the time. They were Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, and Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former head of legal policy and trust.
On January 7, 2021, the Twitter overlords applied a policy they designed that was intended for “Trump alone,” Shellenberger reported.
Following the events of January 6, Schellenberger noted: “Former First Lady @michelleobama, tech journalist @karaswisher, @ADL, high-tech VC @ChrisSacca, and many others, publicly call on Twitter to permanently ban Trump.”
Twitter leadership said the policy would be “distinct from other political leaders,” and that they expressed “no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban,” the files show.
Shellenberger said Roth was “excited to share” that Dorsey approved a decision for Twitter to introduce a new policy that would allow it to permanently ban users who are considered a “repeat offender for civic integrity.”
“The new approach would create a system where five violations (‘strikes’) would result in permanent suspension,” according to Shellenberger.
Roth had publicly acknowledged his anti-Trump views on Twitter many times. He had posted in 2017 that there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE,” in reference to President Trump.
On January 8, 2021, Twitter announced a permanent ban on Trump due to the “risk of further incitement of violence.”
Twitter claimed the ban on Trump was based on “specifically how [Trump’s tweets] are being received & interpreted.”
In 2019, Twitter had insisted it did “not attempt to determine all potential interpretations of the content or its intent.”
Shellenberger noted that “Twitter employees recognize the difference between their own politics & Twitter’s Terms of Service (TOS), but they also engage in complex interpretations of content in order to stamp out prohibited tweets, as a series of exchanges over the ‘#stopthesteal’ hashtag reveal.”
Roth messaged a colleague to ask that they add “stopthesteal” & [QAnon conspiracy term] “kraken” to a blacklist of terms to be deamplified.
Roth’s colleague objects that blacklisting “stopthesteal” risks “deamplifying counterspeech” that validates the election.
In Part 3 of the Twitter files, journalist Matt Taibbi documented how senior Twitter executives censored tweets by Trump in the run-up to the November 2020 election while regularly engaging with representatives of US government law enforcement agencies.
Trump was shadow-banned days before 2020 election
Elon Musk authorized release of the third installment of “The Twitter Files,” which will be the first in a series detailing the decision to ban President Donald Trump after the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
The new releases confirm Trump was “visibility filtered” about a week before the election despite not appearing “to have a particular violation.” They revealed employees worked with urgency to prevent any of Trump’s tweets being “replied to, shared, or liked.”
In other words, Donald Trump was “shadow-banned” in the last week before the 2020 presidential election.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, who also released the first part of the series, noted that “the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import” and that employees “understood in the moment that it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech.”
Taibbi added that senior executives were “clearly liaising” with federal agencies regarding the moderation of content related to the 2020 election that weekly meetings involved officials from the FBI and DHS, and also the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI).
