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.
For now, we are still free. But Britain is imprisoning people for things they said online, censorship leaders are re-grouping in the U.S., and Brazil's government has forced X to close its office there. This is what the transition to global totalitarianism looks like.
Around the world, the crackdown on free speech is accelerating. In Britain, the courts are sentencing people to years in prison for things they posted on X, formerly Twitter. In the United States, the architects of the Censorship Industrial Complex are raising money for Kamala Harris in hopes of re-imposing government censorship on social media platforms after she wins.
And in Brazil, the government has forced X to end its operations after threatening to arrest X’s employees in Brazil if the company continues to refuse to permanently ban disfavored journalists, influencers, and elected political leaders from its platform. The Brazilian government may soon block access to X in Brazil, forcing its citizens to rely upon VPNs, or virtual private networks, in order to access X illegally.
On the one hand, none of these events appear to have anything in common. In Britain, there were riots triggered by misinformation that the killer of two children was an illegal immigrant. In the United States, the Censorship Industrial Complex emerged in reaction to the 2016 election of Donald Trump. And in Brazil, a single Supreme Court justice has taken it upon himself to demand extreme levels of censorship in reaction to the election of a populist president in 2018.
But at another level, all of these events are connected. Starmer, Harris, and Lula have all embraced the first and most important step toward totalitarianism, which is censorship. This is even more alarming given the events of the last few days, when Harris announced that she would seek price controls on food and a housing agenda that would significantly expand the role of the government without increasing supply.
I don’t think the labels of communist or fascist accurately describe the systems that Starmer, Harris, and Lula are creating. In some ways, those three leaders are drawing upon elements of both totalitarian systems. But trying to compare what’s happening now to what happened in the early 20th Century risks confusing us as to what is happening before our very eyes.
But I do think the label of totalitarianism is accurate to describe what these leaders are doing and where they appear to be headed.
Part of what’s so alarming about what they are doing is that they are melding together the demands of global capital and of Woke Leftists at the grassroots level. Both are driven by intolerance of free speech and free expression. Scarcely a day passes without the mainstream media attacking Elon Musk as a threat to democracy because he has allowed freedom of speech on X. Why are they doing that? Because the mainstream media are financed by and should be thought of as global capital’s marketing and propaganda operation.
And, as alarming, there is strong evidence that those leaders are and have been working together to impose a censorship industrial complex worldwide. Europe, Australia, and Brazil have all sought to ban and censor disfavored views and individuals not just in their home countries but worldwide. Over the last decade, these governments, politicians, and political parties have worked to coordinate their work at the United Nations, World Economic Forum, and other NGOs that operate across borders. And reporting by Public and others has uncovered collaboration between intelligence agencies in all three nations.
Media disinformation that populism poses a threat to democracy has increased the public’s support for online censorship. From 2018 to 2023, the share of Democrats who told Pew they wanted the government to engage in more censorship of disfavored online speech rose from 40% to 70%. An identical dynamic is occurring in Brazil and Britain, whereby the mainstream news media and Left-wing political activists have called for the censorship of their political enemies.
Friends, I’m sorry to say, but this is what the global transition to totalitarianism looks like. Big businesses, left-wing governments, and the legacy news media have made clear that they cannot tolerate free speech online. They grew accustomed to controlling public opinion first through the legacy media and then through Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
Global elites have made clear that they believe that freedom of speech on a single social media platform, and one that is far smaller than Facebook or Google, is intolerable. This desire for total control is the central characteristic of the totalitarianism that is presently emerging from elites at the corporate and political levels around the world.
In addition to pushing censorship, these leaders and global elites are seeking to overturn liberal democracies and impose a radically different system of iliberal rule in the Western world. Rather than meritocracy and equal justice for all, elites are seeking to impose a Woke racialist hierarchy that gives preferential treatment to some groups and prejudicial treatment to other groups supposedly based on historic oppression.
There are signs of hope. Recently, a group of censorsial advertisers called the group of advertisers, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) disbanded after X sued them.
But X cannot defend freedom of speech alone. We need a global free speech movement to defend our fundamental freedom against tyranny. If we lose free speech we will lose everything else, including our civilization. The step between censorship and price controls and shortages will be a very small one.
We are working with our allies around the world to raise the alarm. In June we gathered free speech advocates from the United States, Britain, Brazil, and other countries, and we are now working together on a combined effort to stand up for freedom and against the tyrants.
If you’d like to support our work, please subscribe now to Public. If you can do more than that, please consider a tax-deductible donation to support the free speech movement.
The moment we have been warning about is approaching more rapidly than any of us expected.civilizationworks.org/donate
Germany is on the brink of becoming a police state.
"The Federal Ministry of the Interior wants to give the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) the right to secretly enter and search homes. The draft reform of the BKA law provides for the authority to secretly enter homes as an accompanying measure to online searches and source telecommunications surveillance. The draft has been made available to SPIEGEL."
The most amazing thing about the legacy media right now is how it is accelerating its own destruction by doing everything it accuses its enemies of, from spreading disinformation to undermining democracy.
Just 7 percent of the public told Gallup last year that they have a “great deal of trust in the media,” while 38% say they have no trust at all.
If they keep up what they’re doing, that first number will decline further and the second number will rise.
Good riddance. The media has become little more than party and state propaganda.
Below is the guy who worked in the Biden White House and demanded that Facebook censor accurate information. When he was asked to define “misinformation” before Congress he pretended he didn’t know how. He was later caught on video boasting of his censorship efforts.
“As you know,” wrote the Facebook executive whose name was redacted, “in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation.”
I thought this was a joke at first but it’s not: Kamala Harris’ campaign is segregating its volunteers by race. These are the people who spent decades smearing their opponents as racists. Why do people tolerate this degrading treatment?
Woke racism means believing that being black is magic. This is no different from the grotesque and childish racism that Martin Luther King and millions of Americans rejected 60 years ago.
"We have an idea that, to show that you're a good person who knows racism exists, you're supposed to treat black people like children. We've gone from helping black people in the real world to a religion.."