Part 1, where @mtaibbi documents how senior Twitter executives violated their own policies to prevent the spread of accurate information about Hunter Biden’s laptop;
And Part 3, where @mtaibbi documents how senior Twitter execs censored tweets by Trump in the run-up to the Nov 2020 election while regularly engaging with representatives of U.S. government law enforcement agencies.
For years, Twitter had resisted calls to ban Trump.
“Blocking a world leader from Twitter,” it wrote in 2018, “would hide important info... [and] hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”
But after the events of Jan 6, the internal and external pressure on Twitter CEO @jack grows.
Former First Lady @MichelleObama , tech journalist @karaswisher , @ADL , high-tech VC @ChrisSacca , and many others, publicly call on Twitter to permanently ban Trump.
Dorsey was on vacation in French Polynesia the week of January 4-8, 2021. He phoned into meetings but also delegated much of the handling of the situation to senior execs @yoyoel , Twitter’s Global Head of Trust and Safety, and @vijaya Head of Legal, Policy, & Trust.
As context, it's important to understand that Twitter’s staff & senior execs were overwhelmingly progressive.
In 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, & 99% of Twitter staff's political donations went to Democrats.
In 2017, Roth tweeted that there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.”
In April 2022, Roth told a colleague that his goal “is to drive change in the world,” which is why he decided not to become an academic.
On January 7, @jack emails employees saying Twitter needs to remain consistent in its policies, including the right of users to return to Twitter after a temporary suspension
After, Roth reassures an employee that "people who care about this... aren't happy with where we are"
Around 11:30 am PT, Roth DMs his colleagues with news that he is excited to share.
“GUESS WHAT,” he writes. “Jack just approved repeat offender for civic integrity.”
The new approach would create a system where five violations ("strikes") would result in permanent suspension.
“Progress!” exclaims a member of Roth’s Trust and Safety Team.
The exchange between Roth and his colleagues makes clear that they had been pushing @jack for greater restrictions on the speech Twitter allows around elections.
The colleague wants to know if the decision means Trump can finally be banned. The person asks, "does the incitement to violence aspect change that calculus?”
Roth says it doesn't. "Trump continues to just have his one strike" (remaining).
Roth's colleague's query about "incitement to violence" heavily foreshadows what will happen the following day.
On January 8, Twitter announces a permanent ban on Trump due to the "risk of further incitement of violence."
On J8, Twitter says its ban is based on "specifically how [Trump's tweets] are being received & interpreted."
But in 2019, Twitter said it did "not attempt to determine all potential interpretations of the content or its intent.”
The *only* serious concern we found expressed within Twitter over the implications for free speech and democracy of banning Trump came from a junior person in the organization. It was tucked away in a lower-level Slack channel known as “site-integrity-auto."
"This might be an unpopular opinion but one off ad hoc decisions like this that don’t appear rooted in policy are imho a slippery slope... This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world..."
Twitter employees use the term "one off" frequently in their Slack discussions. Its frequent use reveals significant employee discretion over when and whether to apply warning labels on tweets and "strikes" on users. Here are typical examples.
Recall from #TwitterFiles2 by @bariweiss that, according to Twitter staff, "We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do."
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 immediately DMs 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.
Indeed, notes Roth's colleague, "a quick search of top stop the steal tweets and they’re counterspeech"
But they quickly come up with a solution: "deamplify accounts with stopthesteal in the name/profile" since "those are not affiliated with counterspeech"
But it turns out that even blacklisting "kraken" is less straightforward than they thought. That's because kraken, in addition to being a QAnon conspiracy theory based on the mythical Norwegian sea monster, is also the name of a cryptocurrency exchange, and was thus "allowlisted"
Employees struggle with whether to punish users who share screenshots of Trump's deleted J6 tweets
"we should bounce these tweets with a strike given the screen shot violates the policy"
"they are criticising Trump, so I am bit hesitant with applying strike to this user"
What if a user dislikes Trump *and* objects to Twitter's censorship? The tweet still gets deleted. But since the *intention* is not to deny the election result, no punishing strike is applied.
"if there are instances where the intent is unclear please feel free to raise"
Around noon, a confused senior executive in advertising sales sends a DM to Roth.
Sales exec: "jack says: 'we will permanently suspend [Trump] if our policies are violated after a 12 hour account lock'… what policies is jack talking about?"
Roth: "*ANY* policy violation"
What happens next is essential to understanding how Twitter justified banning Trump.
Sales exec: "are we dropping the public interest [policy] now..."
Roth, six hours later: "In this specific case, we're changing our public interest approach for his account..."
The ad exec is referring to Twitter’s policy of “Public-interest exceptions," which allows the content of elected officials, even if it violates Twitter rules, “if it directly contributes to understanding or discussion of a matter of public concern”
Roth pushes for a permanent suspension of Rep. Matt Gaetz even though it “doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh)”
It's a kind of test case for the rationale for banning Trump.
“I’m trying to talk [Twitter’s] safety [team] into... removal as a conspiracy that incites violence.”
Around 2:30, comms execs DM Roth to say they don't want to make a big deal of the QAnon ban to the media because they fear "if we push this it looks we’re trying to offer up something in place of the thing everyone wants," meaning a Trump ban.
That evening, a Twitter engineer DMs to Roth to say, "I feel a lot of debates around exceptions stem from the fact that Trump’s account is not technically different from anybody else’ and yet treated differently due to his personal status, without corresponding _Twitter rules_.."
Roth's response hints at how Twitter would justify deviating from its longstanding policy. "To put a different spin on it: policy is one part of the system of how Twitter works... we ran into the world changing faster than we were able to either adapt the product or the policy."
The evening of January 7, the same junior employee who expressed an "unpopular opinion" about "ad hoc decisions... that don’t appear rooted in policy," speaks up one last time before the end of the day.
Earlier that day, the employee wrote, "My concern is specifically surrounding the unarticulated logic of the decision by FB. That space fills with the idea (conspiracy theory?) that all... internet moguls... sit around like kings casually deciding what people can and cannot see."
The employee notes, later in the day, "And Will Oremus noticed the inconsistency too...," linking to an article for OneZero at Medium called, "Facebook Chucked Its Own Rulebook to Ban Trump."
"The underlying problem," writes @WillOremus , is that “the dominant platforms have always been loath to own up to their subjectivity, because it highlights the extraordinary, unfettered power they wield over the global public square...
"... and places the responsibility for that power on their own shoulders… So they hide behind an ever-changing rulebook, alternately pointing to it when it’s convenient and shoving it under the nearest rug when it isn’t.”
“Facebook’s suspension of Trump now puts Twitter in an awkward position. If Trump does indeed return to Twitter, the pressure on Twitter will ramp up to find a pretext on which to ban him as well.”
Indeed. And as @bariweiss will show tomorrow, that’s exactly what happened.
Hunter Biden's attorneys yesterday urged the Justice Department to investigate the whistleblower who gave his laptop to the FBI without providing *any* new evidence suggesting criminal activity.
President @JoeBiden must reject his son's chilling demands.
Hunter's attorneys demanded a criminal investigation of the computer repair store owner who gave the laptop to the FBI in December 2019, and of Biden’s political enemies, including Rudy Giuliani, a former President Donald Trump advisor, who gave the laptop to the New York Post.
“Mr. [John Paul] Mac Isaac’s intentional, reckless, and likely unlawful conduct allowed for hundreds of gigabytes of Mr. Biden’s personal data, without any discretion, to be circulated around the Internet,” said Hunter Biden’s attorney.
Mainstream news journalists believe they are more fair and objective than the public, but Pew finds the opposite: where 76% of U.S. adults agree that "Journalists should always strive to give every side equal coverage," just 44% of journalists do.
The younger and more progressive a journalist is, the more likely he or she is to agree that "Every side does not always deserve equal coverage."
Your suspicion that the journalists who frequently complain of "misinformation," or who have "disinfo" in their Twitter bio, are the ones most opposed to equal news coverage.
“Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the trend was positive…Today, the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations”
“Bob Woodward, of the Post, told me that news coverage of the Russia inquiry ‘wasn’t handled well’ and that he thought viewers and readers had been “cheated.” He urged newsrooms to “walk down the painful road of introspection.’”
“It was Hillary, not Trump, who began her campaign facing scrutiny over Russia ties….including a lucrative speech in Moscow by Bill Clinton, Russia-related donations to the Clinton family foundation, and Russia-friendly initiatives by the Obama administration”
The world's most endangered whale is the North Atlantic right whale. Only 340 are left, down from 480 in 2010. Now, 10 new massive offshore wind energy projects could make them extinct.
Why are green NGOs siding with the wind industry over the whales?
Since the passage of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, environmentalists have fought for strict protections for endangered species and the “precautionary principle,” which states that if there is any risk that a human activity will make a species extinct, it should be illegal.
And yet here we are, on the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, watching the whole of the environmental movement — @audubonsociety@SierraClub@NRDC@WHOI@NEAQ@mysticaquarium — betray the precautionary principle and risk the extinction of the N.A. right whale.
The rise in police killings in the U.S. along with the rise in homicides is a direct result of anti-police politicians like you who demonized the police, drove them out of their jobs, and pushed many of the best ones into more affluent and whiter neighborhoods.
I agree it's terrible that police killings reached a record high in 2022, and that 31 unarmed black men were killed by police, but over 100 times more black people were killed since George Floyd, in large measure due to the war on police.
"Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is among the proponents of the call to defund the police... Asked, 'What does an America with defunded police look like to you?' Ocasio-Cortez responded, 'It looks like a suburb.'"
"I have been a police officer & the victim of police abuse. A video will trigger pain and sadness & make us angry. My message is to respect the wishes of Mr. Nichols' mother. If you need to express your anger and outrage, do so peacefully" — New York Mayor @ericadamsfornyc
“If you’re here for me and Tyre, you’ll protest peacefully.”
— Mother of Tyre Nichols, who was beaten to death in Memphis by police officers
Everybody wants police offers to do a better job, but when that turns into abolishing the police, defunding the police, and demonizing the police, homicides, crime, and violence all rise.