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The Twitter Files
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Twitter Files #3-5: how Twitter banned Trump

Three threads by Taibbi, Shellenberger and Weiss traced Twitter's path to permanently suspending President Trump on January 8, 2021. Staff first found his final tweets did not break the rules; senior executives and employee pressure moved the decision. Twitter cited 'the risk of further incitement of violence.'

Dec 9, 2022
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Whose side it served: Democrats

Removing the sitting Republican president from the platform weakened him and his supporters' reach.

What the record shows

Taibbi reported that on October 8, 2020, executives opened a Slack channel, 'us2020_xfn_enforcement,' for election-related removals, and that trust and safety head Yoel Roth met weekly with the FBI and DHS. Shellenberger reported that Roth asked to blacklist terms like 'stopthesteal' and 'kraken.' Weiss reported that on January 8, 2021, safety staff reviewing Trump's tweets wrote 'I think we'd have a hard time saying this is incitement.' Within about 90 minutes, Gadde asked whether the tweets could be 'coded incitement to further violence.' More than 300 employees signed a letter demanding a ban, and Twitter suspended Trump that day under its glorification-of-violence policy.

In their words

“I think we'd have a hard time saying this is incitement.”— Twitter safety staffer, Jan 8, 2021 (per Weiss) · source
“coded incitement to further violence”— Vijaya Gadde, Twitter head of legal, policy and trust (per Weiss) · source
The other side

Twitter acted two days after the January 6 Capitol riot, and its stated concern was further violence around the inauguration. Taibbi wrote that he was told Trump-side moderation requests may exist but were absent from the records he reviewed, and later testimony showed the Trump White House did ask Twitter to remove tweets.

Sources

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