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.
You are not crazy, you are right: elites across the West are imposing a crackdown on speech. They have weaponized intelligence and security agencies. The news media are helping them. But they will lose in Ireland and could lose elsewhere. We will support your fight for freedom.
We should trust @BBC to fight misinformation, it says. But we shouldn't. Last year it spread false information about hate speech, Nigel Farage, and Israel-Gaza. Now, a former BBC reporter says it killed a major story about the coverup of medical mistreatment of gender confusion.
The former BBC reporter @hannahsbee went on to write a book, "A Time To Think," about the scandal of giving drugs and surgeries to gender-confused kids. Last year, her book was short-listed for the prestigious "Orwell Prize."
Here's what happened, as reported in The Times Of London, today:
Barnes "was editing [BBC flagship program] Newsnight on the night she revealed that the [gender clinic hospital] Tavistock trust’s medical director, Dr Dinesh Sinha, had failed to mention a number of safeguarding concerns raised by [gender clinic] Gids staff in a review he had published of the service.
"It was a turning point in the story: a revelation that prompted the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to conduct its own review, in which Gids would ultimately be rated 'inadequate.' Barnes had worked a 16-hour shift, editing the package down so that the story could air on the various news bulletins. None of it ran. 'It wasn’t anywhere on the BBC. The online piece was so buried that even though I had written it, I couldn’t find it.'"
For years, experts said we should give drugs and surgeries to kids confused about their gender. Given the sterility, loss of sexual function, and regret, that's been changing. Now, a French Senate report calls it “one of the greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine."
"Maud Vasselle, a mother whose daughter underwent gender transition treatment, told Le Figaro: 'A child is not old enough to ask to have her body altered.
"'My daughter just needed the certificate of a psychiatrist, which she obtained after a one-hour consultation. But doctors don’t explain the consequences of puberty blockers,' she added.
“'My daughter didn’t realise that life wasn’t going to be so easy with all these treatments... She was a brilliant little girl but now she’s failing at school. And she is far from having found the solution to her problems.'"
The French Senate report comes in the wake of leaked WPATH Files, which show that "gender medicine" doctors, therapists, and activists know they're causing harm and not getting informed consent from their victims.
Victory! Quack trans group @WPATH has deleted its pseudoscientific "Standards of Care v8" from its website!
This comes two weeks after the release of the WPATH Files, which revealed widespread medical mistreatment and fraud
WPATH yesterday:
WPATH today:
h/t @Janedoeordont
WPATH may also have removed its president, Marci Bowers.
Here's WPATH's website yesterday:
Here's WPATH's web site today:
Everyone from the New York Times to the American Medical Association has, for years, relied on WPATH. Neither @NYT nor @AmerMedicalAssn has responded to the WPATH Files, despite growing evidence that "gender medicine" is the largest medical mistreatment scandal in history.
The Internet means we should rethink the First Amendment, say the media. But it doesn't. Telegraphs, radio, and TV didn't require restricting free speech. There's something wrong with anyone so intolerant of their fellow citizens that they want the government to censor them.
Jeff Kosseff: "Hey, Let's Not Rethink The First Amendment"
Leading free speech scholar pushes back against widespread claim that "peer-to-peer misinformation" on the Internet justifies government censorship
by @shellenberger
Many journalists, university professors, and Democrats say we must change how we think about the First Amendment for the Internet age. Maybe the government had no role in regulating speech before there existed social media platforms like X and Facebook, where “peer-to-peer misinformation” thrives. But now, given the threat such misinformation poses to democracy, we need the government to restrict what can be said on the Internet, claim Stanford researchers, the New York Times, and the Biden administration.
All of that is dangerous nonsense, according to Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and author of a new book, Liar In A Crowded Theater. “Starting about a century ago,” he told me in a new podcast, “the Supreme Court gradually developed robust [free speech] protections for all but a handful of exceptions…. And I think that, for the Internet, it needs to be the same, where we start off with the premise that this speech is not subject to regulation.”
Kosseff recognizes the Internet’s massive impact and the limits to freedom of speech. “I think, obviously, you need to have some somewhat different rules to make [the First Amendment] make sense on the Internet,” he explains. “And you can't [for example] lie in court and then say, ‘My rights are protected by the First Amendment.’”
However, the Supreme Court already ruled in Reno v. ACLU in 1997 that the First Amendment applied to speech on the Internet. After the Communications Decency Act passed in 1996, an aspect of it was challenged as unconstitutional. “The government's defense of it was, ‘Well, the Internet is not really like your average speech.' You don't get the full scope of First Amendment protections for the Internet. Instead, you get lesser protections, kind of like you get for radio and TV because the FCC can regulate cursing and pornography.’
“The Supreme Court very soundly and clearly rejected that. It said, ‘No, the Internet is not like broadcast because broadcast has scarce spectrum that has to be regulated by the government. The Internet is this new medium. ' It's a beautiful opinion. Justice Stevens wrote it, and most of it was joined by all of the justices. There were two minor dissents. I think that principle needs to carry on.”
I wanted to interview Kosseff before tomorrow’s Supreme Court hearing on Murthy v. Missouri, a potentially landmark First Amendment case involving government demands for online censorship....
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Gender medicine looked like the future. Now, the Times of London, one of the most respected newspapers in the world, calls it "Quack Medicine," and is urging that it be "reined in entirely." US media, medical associations, and politicians should follow the UK's lead.
"Quack Medicine"
Citing WPATH Files, The Times of London denounces "gender-affirming care"
Well, somebody had to say it. All the better that it’s one of the most respected newspapers in the world.
The prescription of puberty blockers to children is “Quack Medicine,” thunders The Times of London, one of the most influential center-left newspapers in the West:
"In the Western world at least, it is normal for new treatments to undergo rigorous testing before being accepted into mainstream medicine. Often, the complaint from those who might benefit from therapies is that approval takes too long. This excess of caution may be frustrating for those who need help but far worse would be a system in which patients became guinea pigs in unregulated mass experiments with potentially life-altering and irremediable consequences. Such is the case with puberty blockers, which for years have been fed to children in this country who are confused about their identity and sexuality."
The editorial accompanies a long news story and a column by Janice Turner. “One day, we’ll look back on the era of puberty blockers with horror,” Turner writes. “This shocking chapter in medical history, where the ideological objectives of trans rights campaigners trumped the welfare of disturbed children, is coming to an end worldwide.”
Turner cites the WPATH Files as evidence. “Leaks from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the body which formulates guidance on “trans healthcare,” reveal doctors perplexed at how they should explain to an 11-year-old child that drugs will render them infertile.”...
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