Censorship: Twitter Takeover Totally Panics Political Regime of LeftLibDemSocMediaTechPol

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Donald J Trump Won The US 2020 Presidential Election


Twitter Trust And Safety Team Found Trump Tweets Did Not Violate Policy

THE TWITTER FILES - Full text and images in original articles

https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364672874643456

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1602387025855885312

Reported by
@ShellenbergerMD
@IsaacGrafstein
@SnoozyWeiss
@Olivia_Reingold
@petersavodnik
@NellieBowles
Follow all of our work at The Free Press:
@TheFP

After an unexplained delay, journalist Bari Weiss has dropped the
third installment of THE TWITTER FILES: The Removal of Donald Trump.
Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here.

The new drop reveals that Twitter employees did not believe former
President Trump had violated Twitter's policies.

"I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement," wrote one
staffer in an internal message, adding: "It's pretty clear he's saying
the ‘American Patriots’ are the ones who voted for him and not the
terrorists (we can call them that, right?)..."

Another staffer agreed, writing: "Don’t see the incitement angle here."

"I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet,"
wrote Anika Navaroli, a Twitter policy official. "I’ll respond in the
elections channel and say that our team has assessed and found no
vios”—or violations—“for the DJT one.”

    Under pressure from hundreds of activist employees, Twitter
deplatforms Trump, a sitting US President, even though they themselves
acknowledge that he didn’t violate the rules: https://t.co/60PplztV4k
    — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 12, 2022

Read the entire thread below:

    2. 6:46 am: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for
me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT
VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated
unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” pic.twitter.com/7L252fqqK6
    — Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

Continued;

    3. 7:44 am: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going
to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

    4. For years, Twitter had resisted calls both internal and
external to ban Trump on the grounds that blocking a world leader from
the platform or removing their controversial tweets would hide
important information that people should be able to see and debate.

    5. “Our mission is to provide a forum that enables people to be
informed and to engage their leaders directly,” the company wrote in
2019. Twitter’s aim was to “protect the public’s right to hear from
their leaders and to hold them to account.”

    World Leaders on Twitter: principles & approach

    6. But after January 6, as @mtaibbi and @shellenbergermd have
documented, pressure grew, both inside and outside of Twitter, to ban
Trump.

    7. There were dissenters inside Twitter. “Maybe because I am from
China,” said one employee on January 7, “I deeply understand how
censorship can destroy the public conversation.”

    8. But voices like that one appear to have been a distinct
minority within the company. Across Slack channels, many Twitter
employees were upset that Trump hadn’t been banned earlier.

    9. After January 6, Twitter employees organized to demand their
employer ban Trump. “There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,”
said one Twitter employee.

    10. “We have to do the right thing and ban this account,” said one
staffer. It’s “pretty obvious he’s going to try to thread the needle
of incitement without violating the rules,” said another.

    11. In the early afternoon of January 8, The Washington Post
published an open letter signed by over 300 Twitter employees to CEO
Jack Dorsey demanding Trump’s ban. “We must examine Twitter’s
complicity in what President-Elect Biden has rightly termed
insurrection.”

    12. But the Twitter staff assigned to evaluate tweets quickly
concluded that Trump had *not* violated Twitter’s policies.“I think
we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote one staffer.

    13. “It's pretty clear he's saying the ‘American Patriots’ are the
ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that,
right?) from Wednesday.”

    14. Another staffer agreed: “Don’t see the incitement angle here.”

    15. “I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT
tweet,” wrote Anika Navaroli, a Twitter policy official. “I’ll respond
in the elections channel and say that our team has assessed and found
no vios”—or violations—“for the DJT one.”

    16. She does just that: “as an fyi, Safety has assessed the DJT
Tweet above and determined that there is no violation of our policies
at this time.”

    17. (Later, Navaroli would testify to the House Jan. 6
committee:“For months I had been begging and anticipating and
attempting to raise the reality that if nothing—if we made no
intervention into what I saw occuring, people were going to die.”)

    18. Next, Twitter’s safety team decides that Trump’s 7:44 am ET
tweet is also not in violation. They are unequivocal: “it’s a clear no
vio. It’s just to say he’s not attending the inauguration”

    19. To understand Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, we must
consider how Twitter deals with other heads of state and political
leaders, including in Iran, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.

    20. In June 2018, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted, “#Israel
is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be
removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.”

    Twitter neither deleted the tweet nor banned the Ayatollah.

    21. In October 2020, the former Malaysian Prime Minister said it
was “a right” for Muslims to “kill millions of French people.” Twitter
deleted his tweet for “glorifying violence,” but he remains on the
platform. The tweet below was taken from the Wayback Machine:

    22. Muhammadu Buhari, the President of Nigeria, incited violence
against pro-Biafra groups.“Those of us in the fields for 30 months,
who went through the war,” he wrote, “will treat them in the language
they understand.” Twitter deleted the tweet but didn't ban Buhari.

    23. In October 2021, Twitter allowed Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy
Ahmed to call on citizens to take up arms against the Tigray region.
Twitter allowed the tweet to remain up, and did not ban the prime
minister.

    24. In early February 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
government threatened to arrest Twitter employees in India, and to
incarcerate them for up to seven years after they restored hundreds of
accounts that had been critical of him. Twitter did not ban Modi.

    25. But Twitter executives did ban Trump, even though key staffers
said that Trump had not incited violence—not even in a “coded” way.

    26. Less than 90 minutes after Twitter employees had determined
that Trump’s tweets were not in violation of Twitter policy, Vijaya
Gadde—Twitter’s Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust—asked whether it
could, in fact, be “coded incitement to further violence.”

    27. A few minutes later, Twitter employees on the “scaled
enforcement team” suggest that Trump’s tweet may have violated
Twitter’s Glorification of Violence policy—if you interpreted the
phrase “American Patriots” to refer to the rioters.

    28. Things escalate from there. Members of that team came to “view
him as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths
comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on
the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.”

    29. Two hours later, Twitter executives host a 30-minute all-staff
meeting. Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde answer staff questions as to why
Trump wasn’t banned yet. But they make some employees angrier.

    30. “Multiple tweeps [Twitter employees] have quoted the Banality
of Evil suggesting that people implementing our policies are like
Nazis following orders,” relays Yoel Roth to a colleague.

    31. Dorsey requested simpler language to explain Trump’s
suspension. Roth wrote, “god help us [this] makes me think he wants to
share it publicly”

    32. One hour later, Twitter announces Trump’s permanent suspension
“due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

    33. Many at Twitter were ecstatic.

    34. And congratulatory: “big props to whoever in trust and safety
is sitting there whack-a-mole-ing these trump accounts”

    35. By the next day, employees expressed eagerness to tackle
“medical misinformation” as soon as possible:

    36. “For the longest time, Twitter’s stance was that we aren’t the
arbiter of truth,” wrote another employee, “which I respected but
never gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.”

    37. But Twitter’s COO Parag Agrawal—who would later succeed Dorsey
as CEO—told Head of Security Mudge Zatko: “I think a few of us should
brainstorm the ripple effects” of Trump's ban. Agrawal added:
“centralized content moderation IMO has reached a breaking point now.”

    38. Outside the United States, Twitter’s decision to ban Trump
raised alarms, including with French President Emmanuel Macron, German
Prime Minister Angela Merkel, and Mexico's President Andres Manuel
Lopez Obrador.

    39. Macron told an audience he didn’t “want to live in a democracy
where the key decisions” were made by private players. “I want it to
be decided by a law voted by your representative, or by regulation,
governance, democratically discussed and approved by democratic
leaders.”

    40. Merkel’s spokesperson called Twitter’s decision to ban Trump
from its platform “problematic” and added that the freedom of opinion
is of “elementary significance.” Russian opposition leader Alexey
Navalny criticized the ban as “an unacceptable act of censorship.”

    41. Whether you agree with Navalny and Macron or the executives at
Twitter, we hope this latest installment of #TheTwitterFiles gave you
insight into that unprecedented decision.

    42. From the outset, our goal in investigating this story was to
discover and document the steps leading up to the banning of Trump and
to put that choice into context.

    43. Ultimately, the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor
news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban
a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social
media company.

    44. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private
company to influence the public discourse and democracy.
    45. This was reported by
    @ShellenbergerMD, @IsaacGrafstein, @SnoozyWeiss, @Olivia_Reingold,
@petersavodnik, @NellieBowles. Follow all of our work at The Free
Press: @TheFP