Part five of Bari Weiss’s “Twitter Files” was released on Monday afternoon, focusing on the social media platform’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump for life. This decision was reversed last month when Elon Musk took control.
The tale was taken up by Weiss’ thread on January 8, 2021, when Trump, with “one remaining strike before being at risk of a permanent ban from Twitter,” sent out two tweets in the small hours of the morning. One was a message to Trump voters in 2020, and the other was an announcement that he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Weiss explains that Twitter fought back against internal and external pressure to ban Trump because doing so would censor vital information that the public needs to be allowed to access and discuss. Weiss noted that this was the official stance of the firm. According to a statement published by Twitter in 2019, the company’s “aim is to create a venue that enables people to be informed and engage their leaders directly” with the goal of “protecting the public’s right to hear from their leaders and to bring them to account.”
Although the Twitter Files have indicated that calls for Trump’s removal from the site increased after January 6, 2021, not everyone on Twitter was enthusiastic about the idea.
An employee “from China” stated that they “fully understand how censorship can damage the public discussion,” which was one of Weiss’s tweets. However, Weiss pointed out that “voices like that one appear to have been a significant minority within the firm” and that “many Twitter workers were furious that Trump hadn’t been banned earlier.”
The next step, as Weiss details in her most recent “Twitter Files” report, was a coordinated effort as “Twitter employees gathered to urge their company ban, Trump.” Trump has been accused of trying to “thread the needle of provocation without breaching the regulations” in light of his attempts.
On January 8, The Washington Post published an open letter signed by more than 300 Twitter workers asking CEO Jack Dorsey to finally ban Trump from the platform.
The staff “soon judged that Trump had *not* broken Twitter’s regulations,” as Weiss put it. Workers reportedly had a hard time proving that Trump’s comments from earlier that day, January 8, constituted “incitement.” According to at least one member of Twitter’s policy team, the President’s most recent tweets did not include any infractions.
The official was even more direct, saying, “Safety has examined the DJT Tweet above and found that there is no infringement of our regulations at this time.”
Later that morning, the same conclusion was made regarding Trump’s other tweet. It’s a “clear no violation,” they said. “Let it be known that he will not be present for the inauguration,” she said.
Executive Vijaya Gadde tried for a way around the conclusions of Twitter staff and banned Trump anyhow by claiming that Trump’s tweets that were not in violation were really “coded incitement.”
Others on Twitter, bolstering Gadde’s efforts, argued that if they took Trump’s statement out of context, they might find a breach of Twitter’s “Glorification of Violence” policy.
As things began to spiral out of control within Twitter’s virtually unanimous ideological bent, company officials called an all-staff meeting to address the situation. CEO Jack Dorsey and CTO Vijay Gadde fielded questions from the employees, many of whom had worked themselves up into a frothing rage. According to internal tweets in Weiss’ thread, the meeting did little to quell the crowd’s mounting ire.
Yoel Roth told a coworker, “many tweeps” have referenced the Banality of Evil to support the idea that those carrying out Twitter’s policies are no better than Nazis carrying out instructions.
To be continued. — Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
Workers like Yoel Roth started to worry that Dorsey was about to reveal why Trump was banned from Twitter.
Soon after, Twitter announced that it had banned the President of the United States, and its workers celebrated wildly, feeling the leftist rush of virtue signaling as they added another victory to their bigoted effort to silence those with whom they disagree.
After what they believed to be a successful removal of Trump from the site, the Twitter staff switched their attention to going after “medical misinformation,” which, as we all know, did not go well and will hopefully be exposed in future disclosures of the “Twitter Files.”
While discussing Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, Parag Agrawal said that “content moderation” has “hit a breaking point presently.”