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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
Dec 19
The government didn’t censor anyone on Covid, say the media. But it did. Facebook’s Zuckerberg even said he regretted giving in to the government's demands. And now, new documents reveal that the Dept. of Homeland Security may have broken the law by hunting down Covid wrongthink. Image
Department Of Homeland Security Illegally Targeted Covid Dissent, New Documents Suggest

DHS’s cybersecurity agency went far beyond its congressional mandate in hunting wrongthink and monitoring emotions

by @galexybrane & @shellenberger
Chris Krebs, founding director of the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security; President Barack Obama; Jen Easterly, Director of CISA (GETTY IMAGES)

The idea that intelligence and security agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and others have been involved in the surveillance and censorship of the American people is a conspiracy theory, according to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was not a victim of government censorship, says NBC News. There was simply no “Censorship Industrial Complex” or government-coordinated activity that targeted American citizens’ speech and violated the First Amendment, mainstream journalists and commentators agree.

But there was and is a Censorship Industrial Complex. The Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) of DHS expanded its mandate in January 2017, during the final days of Barack Obama’s presidency, to cover election infrastructure as critical infrastructure. This would eventually entail protecting “cognitive security” by combating mis- and disinformation. DHS asked four government-funded think tanks to flag “misinformation,” which was often simply political speech that Democrats didn’t like, and together with DHS urge social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to delete, suppress, or censor it in some other way. In 2020 and 2021, the four government contractors worked hand-in-glove with DHS and other government agencies to pressure social media platforms to engage in political censorship.

Defenders of those efforts say they weren’t engaged in censorship and that the Supreme Court agrees with them. Representatives from these Big Four counter-misinformation NGOs say they did not censor anyone, nor could they, since they didn’t operate the social media platforms. They simply did what anyone could do which was to flag misinformation to the social media companies. No government agency ever threatened to harm a social media platform that refused the offers of help from NGOs engaged in counter-misinformation. And the Supreme Court ruled that government officials have long been free to try to persuade the publishers, reporters, and editors at newspapers and thus were and are free to do the same with social media platforms. “CISA does not and has never censored speech or facilitated censorship,” a Senior Advisor for Public Affairs told Public. “Such allegations are riddled with factual inaccuracies.”

In truth, the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire,” said Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in August. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” Senior Facebook executives worried that the Biden administration would not help Facebook deal with its problems complying with European regulations if it didn’t censor vaccine hesitancy.

And CISA did not refute any of Public’s allegations; it simply dismissed them. That may be because there is no dispute over the basic facts of the situation. DHS and the censorship NGOs persuaded the social media giants to give them unique and special status for flagging disfavored election and Covid content in 2020 and 2021 through a special ticketing (Jira) system. Ordinary members of the public not only did not have access to this system, nobody outside the small government-organized censorship clique knew it existed.

The head of the Stanford censorship program said its function was to “fill in the gap of things the government couldn’t do.” And there was virtually no separation between CISA and Stanford’s flagging and censorship operation. CISA’s Director and the Director of one of the Big Four censorship groups texted each other “with some regularity,” according to a staffer. A CISA official named Brian Scully was in a Signal messaging group with at least one Stanford intern and Twitter’s content team.

It has been a mystery about when exactly CISA began its push for censorship. Ostensibly, CISA didn’t ask the four censorship NGOs to create the “Election Integrity Partnership” until mid-2020, and those NGOs did not come up with the idea to create the “Virality Project” on Covid until late 2020, after the elections.

Now, newly obtained documents provided to Public by the America First Legal reveal that CISA began its hunt for disfavored speech about Covid-19 as early as the week of February 18, 2020. The new documents, obtained from litigation by American First Legal against the State Department and CISA, show that the latter agency had Covid censorship on its mind long before it decided to focus on election censorship. The documents thus provide the missing link in CISA’s operation to chill disfavored speech.
“Incredibly, the evidence is that CISA relied on a dangerous, anti-American blob of ‘authorities’ to closely monitor what the American people were saying,” said Reed D. Rubinstein, America First Legal’s Senior Vice President. “CISA was created to protect the homeland from terrorists, not to protect incompetent federal bureaucrats.” While the monitoring of social media narratives may seem innocent, it is the crucial first step in the process of demanding censorship.

These new documents expose the early extent to which the US government repurposed the homeland security apparatus, including DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for domestic control. The documents show that CISA may have sought to counter information from Bhattacharya, despite claims by the mainstream media recently that the government never tried to censor him. And the new documents come at a time when the in-coming Trump administration has its eyes set on defunding government censorship activities, including by CISA and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).

CISA’s early monitoring of Covid narratives may constitute a violation of what’s known as the Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine, argues America First Legal, which holds that government agencies must not stray from the specific legal authorities given to them by Congress. The Supreme Court has rejected claims by government agencies to have authority over issues of “vast economic and political significance” without clear congressional authorization. And CISA arguably had no congressional authorization to monitor such Covid-related speech, which was unrelated to cybersecurity, infrastructure security, or election security. As such, CISA may have indeed broken the law.

Why, then, did it do it? How did an organization supposedly focused on cybersecurity end up tracking and orchestrating the censorship of disfavored Covid information?

Please, subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism and to read the rest of the article!

x.com/shellenberger/…Image
Image
Thank you and bravo to @America1stLegal for their discovery of these damning documents, which show @CISAgov @CISACyber going far beyond its congressional mandate.
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 18
Biden says there’s no “sense of danger” in the repeated invasions of the air space above homes and military bases by unidentified drones. That’s a ridiculous and terrifying lie. Of course there is. Protecting our air space has been one of America’s highest priorities for 80 years Image
From Biden to Mayorkas to DOD spokesperson, the US government officials are flagrantly lying to the American people and nobody knows this more than US military base commanders and the men and women who work in the military.
If you are in the military, Intelligence Community, or other US government agency and know something about these drones, please contact me to shine the light on the wrongdoing.

Encrypted email: michaelshellenberger@proton.me

I will go to prison to protect my sources.
Read 11 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 14
Biden officials @AliMayorkas & John Kirby said, " We have not seen drones penetrate restricted airspace" and "There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace," but US officials have reported drones at Langley, Edwards, Earle, & many other sites.
Drones penetrated restrict airspace at Langley, Norfolk, Edwards, and Nevada National Security Site.

This was heavily reported and so it's very odd for Kirby to make his claim on Thursday and for Mayorkas to repeat it on Friday.

wsj.com/politics/natio…
Now perhaps Kirby and Mayorkas were only referring to the recent drone sightings in New Jersey.

But in NJ there are official reports from Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle of drone incursions in recent weeks.

nypost.com/2024/12/12/us-…Image
Read 7 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 7
There is an epidemic of white police officers killing unarmed black men, we must block the puberty of children born in the wrong bodies to prevent them from killing themselves, the Russians control Trump through a sex blackmail operation, the Covid vaccine prevents infection, millions or billions will die from starvation and harsh weather from climate change, there's no way a Covid virus could have escaped from a lab, mass migration improves societies with no trade-offs, it's best for addicts if we give them hard drugs to use in special sites downtown, we need the government to fight misinformation online in order to save democracy, Biden is sharper than ever, Kamala is 100% prepared to be president, and anyone who disagrees is racist, sexist, and/or fascist.

While many Americans are increasingly and at least partially aware that all of the above are lies, we are still a long way from coming to grips with their enormity, their monstrous consequences, and the totalitarian ways in which the mainstream news media, many employers, and governments demanded that we believe them. Current and former heads of state, our most-trusted journalists, and full professors at Ivy League universities created and propagated those Big Lies, repeatedly, for years, even after they had been thoroughly debunked, sometimes within days or hours of them being made, by people who ruling elites then sought to bankrupt, shame, and ostracize.

There has not yet been a proper accounting of the very many abuses of power, including the Big Lies, by elected officials, the media, and other governing elites during the Woke Reign of Terror (2013 - 2024). That accounting will need not only to thoroughly debunk all of the major lies, it will also need to explore why elites created and perpetuated them, why so many people believed them, why they lasted for so long, and what can be learned from them, both separately and how they worked together as a whole, constituting the worldview of the people who run Western societies and nations. Historians, sociologists, psychologists and many others will, for centuries, study the Work Reign of Terror as a uniquely irrational and self-destructive period in America's history. Hopefully something good, including wisdom, courage, and improved self-governance, will come out of those studies and reflections.
Woke Religion: A TaxonomyImage
Woke Psychopathology: A TaxonomyImage
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 22
The Australian PM @AlboMP wants global censorship to counter misinformation. But only free speech can counter misinformation. Please share this to affirm your opposition to his awful bill!
Was the censorship bill a head fake to jam through Digital ID? 🤔
👀 Image
Read 6 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 21
I am concerned about the impact of social media on children, but this bill is a Trojan horse to create digital IDs, which is a giant leap into the totalitarian dystopia depicted in "Black Mirror," and already in place in China. And @AlboMP has proven censorial and untrustworthy.
Spot on:

Very concerning

Read 7 tweets

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