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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Dec 10, 2022 • 40 tweets • 19 min read • Read on X
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1. TWITTER FILES, PART 4

The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7

As the pressure builds, Twitter executives build the case for a permanent ban
On Jan 7, senior Twitter execs:

- create justifications to ban Trump

- seek a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders

- express no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban

This #TwitterFiles is reported with @lwoodhouse
For those catching up, please see:

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;

Part 2, where @bariweiss shows how senior Twitter execs created secret blacklists to “de-amplify” disfavored Twitter users, not just specific tweets;

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. ImageImageImageImage
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. ImageImage
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" Image
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. Image
“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). Image
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." Image
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.”

blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/c… ImageImage
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." Image
"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..." Image
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. ImageImage
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. ImageImage
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. Image
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" Image
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" Image
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" Image
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" Image
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" Image
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..." Image
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”

help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-p… Image
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.” Image
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. Image
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_.." Image
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." Image
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." Image
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."

onezero.medium.com/facebook-chuck…
"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.”

onezero.medium.com/facebook-chuck…
“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.

/END

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More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Jan 31
Calling anti-ICE riots an "insurrection" or "insurgency... poses dangers," says @nytimes. It "legitimizes the use of violence," says a CSIS expert.

Funny, then, how The Times labeled January 6 an "insurrection" and the same CSIS expert called J6 a "terrorist incident."Image
Image
Image
The Times uses the word "insurgency" rather than "insurrection" for its headline, even though not a single one of the people the article criticizes uses that word. Three use the word "insurrection" and one uses the word "revolution."

Perhaps that's because the Times knows that it led the charge to label January 6 as an "insurrection," and that it is now engaging in flagrant hypocrisy.

nytimes.com/2026/01/31/us/…
Even more disturbing is that the article quotes Seth G. Jones @SethGJones saying, “When you start using the language of warfare and treating someone that has an opposing view as a terrorist or as an insurgent, that legitimizes the use of violence against them."

Well, that's precisely what Jones and his coauthors did in a 2022 @CSIS report, "Pushed to Extremes: Domestic Terrorism amid Polarization and Protest," which labeled January 6 as "the most prominent instance" of a domestic "terrorist incident."

csis.org/analysis/pushe…Image
Read 7 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Jan 29
It was already clear that Alex Pretti was interfering in a law enforcement operation. Now, new @BBC video shows Pretti kicking out the taillight of an ICE SUV and wrestling with ICE agents. His gun is sticking out of his waistband. He screams & spits. He is deranged & dangerous.
In this clip, you can clearly see Pretti refusing to go to ground — just as he refused to do so when he was shot.

Congrats to @thenewsmovement and @BBCNews for their big scoop.
The news media irresponsibly downplayed or didn't properly report on how Pretti was deliberately interfering in a law enforcement operation on the day he was killed.

At a minimum he recklessly waved through traffic on the street and physically confronted ICE, as the image below clearly shows.
I shouldn't have to say this but some people need to hear it: I'm not defending the shooting. It was obviously a mistake. There should be a full investigation and people should be held accountable.

But it is also the case that Democrats, influencers, and the media are getting leftists killed by encouraging them to interfere with law enforcement operations and telling them that they are fighting Nazis.

Pretti showed exceedingly bad judgement in openly wearing a gun as he attacked an ICE vehicle. He showed similarly bad judgement interfering in the ICE operation on Saturday.

Pretti in the new video appears to be in the grip of that very familiar form of derangement.

Here is a link to the full @thenewsmovement video.

I saw some people have been trying to put Community Notes on this video. If you watch it, you will see that it is definitely Pretti, there is no evidence of AI manipulation, and the provenance of the video is known.

youtube.com/watch?v=CRWR13…Image
Read 8 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Jan 25
Most of the debate since yesterday has focused, understandably, on whether the ICE agent acted in what he perceived to be self-defense. Whatever the case, it’s clear that, by encouraging people to interfere in law enforcement operations, the Left is getting people killed. Image
A Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minnesota shot a second person dead yesterday. Most of the debate since then has focused, understandably, on whether the ICE agent acted in what he perceived to be self-defense.

Whatever the case, it’s clear that, by encouraging people to interfere in law enforcement operations, the Left is getting people killed. Videos show both victims, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, impeding law enforcement operations, which progressive nonprofits, Democrats, and liberal influencers have been encouraging for months.

Good drove her vehicle perpendicular to block traffic while her partner taunted ICE officers. Pretti intervened at least twice, first by waving traffic through on the street and again as an ICE officer sought to subdue another person interfering in the operation, triggering the agent to use pepper spray against him.

In saying this, I am not defending the decisions and behaviors of the ICE officers or anyone else. The killings are a tragedy. And there is a worthwhile debate underway over ICE tactics, separate from the specific behaviors of Good and Pretti.

We don’t know what was in the minds of Good and Pretti specifically, but Democrats, progressives, and anti-ICE activists have for years called ICE and the Trump administration fascist and compared them to the Nazis. On January 19, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called ICE “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.” Last year, in California, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation to block ICE from hiding its identities. The Los Angeles mayor called them a “reign of terror.” And a few days ago, the Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota urged citizens to “put your body on the line” to block ICE protests.

Walz and other Democrats have blocked state and local law enforcement from working with ICE, which has contributed to increasingly risky behavior by anti-ICE activists like Good and Pretti, and thus growing danger to everyone involved. There were no Minneapolis police visible in the videos of the Good and Pretti deaths.

And many of America’s largest progressive cities and states are all openly defiant of federal law, declaring themselves “sanctuaries” that protect illegal migrants from the federal government.

California, New York, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and others are “sanctuary states”. At the same time, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, San Diego, Sacramento, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Madison, Milwaukee, Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Newark, Jersey City, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Chapel Hill, Durham, Asheville, Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Reno, are “sanctuary cities.”

The underlying problem is that for decades, schools, Hollywood, and the media have made clear that we should risk and even sacrifice our own lives to stop fascism and Nazism. And yet neither ICE raids nor Trump are fascist, and it is offensive to compare them to the Nazis.

The Nazis rounded up Jewish citizens and shipped them to death camps. ICE, by contrast, is detaining foreigners who the government believes committed criminal offenses beyond coming to the US illegally. No nation in the world has allowed more people to enter illegally. Nor has any treated them with greater due process than the US is doing.

The American people elected Trump president, like it or not, and the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause in Article VI establishes that federal law prevails over conflicting state or local laws. It ensures the Constitution, federal statutes, and treaties are the “supreme Law of the Land,” binding state courts and governments. The ICE raids may be bad politics, but there is no question that they are constitutional.

While some Democrats and progressives know their language is hyperbolic, half of the individuals surveyed told pollsters last year that Trump is a fascist. Such radical beliefs appear to have partly motivated two assassination attempts against Trump and the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

While the radical Left has for decades called its political opponents fascists, these views were until recently marginal views, even within the Democratic Party. Moreover, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton all spoke out against illegal migration until 2016. So what changed? Why did so many Americans come to view a democratically elected president and law enforcement operations as equivalent to fascism? What radicalized the Left?

Part of the answer is bad information. Many progressives believe ICE is simply sweeping up hard-working and law-abiding immigrants, and do not know that 64 percent of immigrants detained since Trump took office in January 2025 had criminal convictions or pending charges, in addition to having broken the law by entering and working in the country without a visa.

For some, labeling Trump as a fascist was simply a political tactic and not something they believed. But many others believe it, as the polling data shows.

Many people, both liberals and conservatives, believe progressives like Good and Pretti are acting out of empathy and sympathy for migrants. But if they are, it is purely ideologically driven, not from any real-world understanding of migrant communities. Few of the white progressives protesting ICE have ever spoken more than a few words to much less gotten to know illegal immigrants, even those who work for them as cleaners, cooks, and gardeners, much less come to understand their lives...

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Read 18 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 23, 2025
So “60 Minutes” straight up lied. Plus, they could have gone to a White House press briefing or asked Trump after a cabinet meeting or on Air Force One. They chose not to. Totally unethical & irresponsible behavior. @bariweiss was right to hold the piece.
Image
Almost like there’s a pattern here
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 22, 2025
It was "corporate censorship" for CBS @bariweiss to delay her story, says "60 Minutes" reporter Sharyn Alfonsi. But Alfonsi presented no evidence to support her allegation. And Alfonsi has a history of biased reporting that even liberal "fact-checkers" denounced as inaccurate. Image
In April of 2021, CBS’s “60 Minutes” falsely claimed that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis exclusively chose Publix, a major Florida supermarket chain, to distribute Covid vaccines because it had donated to his political campaign.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat who helped oversee the state’s vaccine distribution at the time, repeatedly debunked the accusation. He did so first in response to a March 2, 2021, Miami Herald piece.

“This idea why @Publix was picked has been utter nonsense,” Moskowitz wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “We reached out to all pharmacies and they were the only one who at the time could execute on the mission.”

On April 4, the day the “60 Minutes” segment aired, Moskowitz tweeted, “@60Minutes I said this before and I’ll say it again. @Publix was recommended by @FLSERT and @HealthyFla as the other pharmacies were not ready to start. Period! Full Stop! No one from the Governor’s office suggested Publix. It’s just absolute malarkey.”

Now, the same reporter who did the flawed DeSantis piece, Sharyn Alfonsi, has accused her employer of censoring her story about deportees El Salvador’s prison. “The public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship,” Alfonsi wrote in an email to her colleagues that has been viewed four million times on X.

However, Alfonsi offered no evidence to support her allegation of “corporate censorship,” implying that people to whom Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss reports caused her to delay the piece.

Neither Weiss nor Alfonsi responded to a request for comment. If either does, we will update this story immediately. Moreover, we will report any evidence that we or others find that shows that corporate executives above Weiss directed her to kill the story. So far, there is none.

And an editorial decision is not the same as censorship, particularly since Weiss said she is delaying, not killing, the segment.

Alfonsi, in her leaked email, said she tried to get a response from the Trump administration but couldn’t, which was one of the reasons Weiss cited in her email to CBS staff for holding back the piece.

An experienced television news journalist, who has been in the business for three decades, said CBS could have done what it has often done in the past, which is to ask a Trump official at one of the many press availabilities.

“They could have sent a CBS reporter to the White House press briefing,” the person said, or had a reporter ask President Trump directly during one of his frequent press conferences at the White House and on Air Force One. The CBS website shows that it has at least six full-time reporters at the White House.

“The episode shows Sharyn’s poor investigative skills,” the person added. “She should have doorstepped the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security or sent someone to the White House.”

To “doorstop” a person is when a journalist confronts someone, such as a senior government official, often when they are coming or going into their workplace.

“Sharyn could have gone to the briefing herself, or CBS could have gone in and said ‘CBS has finished an investigation. Here are the allegations. How do you respond?’”

Alfonsi falsely claimed in her segment that DeSantis gave an “exclusive” to Publix. Floridians could get the Covid vaccine from many different sources, including county health departments, other major pharmacy chains including CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart, and mass vaccination drive-thru sites with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Three major liberal or left-wing fact-checking organizations and the liberal Boston public TV station WGBH all criticized the piece. “60 Minutes’ misses the mark in its story about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and COVID-19 vaccines,” wrote Poynter. “A sloppy moment on Sunday’s show is raising serious concerns.”

Wrote Politifact, “While “60 Minutes” focused on his emphatic denial, it left out the background that he offered about how the state had been working with other retail pharmacies to distribute coronavirus vaccines at long-term care facilities in December and his own interactions with Publix customers.”

Said the progressive Media Nation, “It’s a rare day when we encounter as blatant an example of liberal media bias as in the “60 Minutes” report last Sunday on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis…Unfortunately, the botched story on DeSantis, a Republican, will be cited by conservatives for a long time as evidence that you just can’t trust the media.”

And a Boston CBS News reporter said, “If you’re going to smear someone by guilt-by-association, or pay-to-play, which is about the most serious offense a public official can engage in, you better have the facts in a row. If you don’t, you’d best leave it out.”

There are other signs of “60 Minutes” bias....

x.com/shellenberger/…

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Here is the liberal Boston PBS member station segment on Sharyn Alfonsi's biased and inaccurate story. Every single person in it criticizes Alfonsi's piece about Ron DeSantis' vaccine roll-out.

Nobody who looks at this walks away thinking that Alfonsi did anything other than an irresponsible hit piece.
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 10, 2025
Days before last year’s election, the media claimed Trump wanted to kill Liz Cheney, which we debunked at the time. @BBC has now admitted it was a lie. @CNN should do the same. Notably, BBC & CNN have, for years, promoted censorship of their competitors for “misinformation.” Image
The media around the world demand government censorship on the basis of the disinformation it produces on Trump, covid, climate, gender, Ukraine, etc. The EU is currently paying European media to act as “trusted flaggers” — censors — of social media.
It’s digital totalitarianism.
A Norwegian newspaper spread misinformation about the demolition of the Nord Stream pipeline and Facebook censored on the basis of that censorship

x.com/shellenberger/… x.com/shellenberger/…
Read 6 tweets

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