The third installment of Elon Musk’s “Twitter File” was published Friday night, shedding light on internal debates at the social media giant who was banned from the platform in January 2021 while former President Donald Trump was still in office. was given.
Former Rolling Stone political reporter and journalist Matt Taibbi, who released the first installment of Twitter Files, has announced that the third twitter thread It’s based on information received from Musk, who bought the company in October for more than $44 billion.
“I’ll show you something that hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of our internal standards a few months ago. [Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot]against the backdrop of ongoing documented interactions with government agencies, including decisions by senior officials that violate their own policies,” Taibbi wrote.
“Whatever your opinion on that day’s decision to fire Trump, Twitter’s internal communications between January 6th and January 8th clearly have historical significance. Even knew it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech.”
Part 1 of our third installment focuses on the days following the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots. The riots came on the day Congress ratified the results of President Joe Biden’s election victory over incumbent President Trump.
Two days later, on Jan. 8, Trump’s Twitter account, which has grown into a primary means of communicating with his supporters amid a tumultuous relationship with the mainstream media, was permanently suspended. said It expelled the president “due to the danger of inciting further violence.”
Tabbi shared a screenshot of an internal chat in the days following the riots at the United States Capitol, where an anonymous Twitter official asked:
“As soon as they finished banning Trump, Twitter executives began processing new powers.” They prepared to ban future presidents and the White House, perhaps even Joe Biden. The ‘New Administration’ has stated that ‘it will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary’.”
The journalist shared another official screenshot stating that Twitter would take action to “restrict” the use of government accounts such as @POTUS and @WhiteHouse, but not suspend them.
“However, these accounts will eventually transition to a new administration and will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary to mitigate real-world harm,” an internal message reads.
In announcing Trump’s ban on Jan. 8, 2021, Twitter said the company would “Beautification of violent policies.”
The first tweet (from January 8, 2021) is:
“The 75,000,000 great American patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN will have huge voices well into the future.
A second tweet (hours later) states:
“To all who have inquired, I will not be attending the inauguration ceremony on January 20.”
A Twitter official said in a message at the time that the “contextualized” narratives Trump and his supporters have used over the past four years should be considered when it comes to the company’s response to the tweets.
“Context matters, and the story Trump and his friends have pursued over the course of this election, and frankly, must be taken into account when interpreting and analyzing their tweets over the past four years and beyond. “The bigger decisions are about our moral obligations and decisions as a company, and user sentiment should not be driven based on #1. [redacted] Given its historical context and current climate, I think his tweet violates our rules. ”
Taibbi said that “the bulk of the internal debate” leading to Trump’s ban occurred between Jan. 6 and Jan. 8, 2021, but that “the intellectual framework was set in the months preceding the Capitol riots.” It was built,” he reported.
“Before J6, Twitter was a unique combination of automated rules-based enforcement and more subjective moderation by senior management. @BariWeiss The company reportedly has a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, almost all of which were thrown into pre-J6 Trump (and others),” Taibbi wrote.
“As the election approaches, senior management—perhaps under pressure from federal agencies with whom they have met more as time goes on—has struggled more and more with the rules and has been forced to do what they would have done anyway. We started talking about ‘vios’ as an excuse.”
On October 8, 2020, executives launched a Slack channel called ‘us2020_xfn_enforcement’. According to Taibbi, the channel became a “discussion for election-related takedowns, especially those involving ‘high-profile’ accounts,” and was dubbed “Very Important Tweeters.”
Twitter had already employed a “safety operations” team that followed a more rules-based process, but what Taibbi called the “fast Supreme moderates” was formed by a small team of executives. . The executive team “made content rulings on the fly, often within minutes, based on guesswork, intuition, and even Google searches, even when the president was involved.”
“During this time, executives were in clear communication with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies regarding the moderation of election-related content,” Taibbi said. “We are still in the early stages of reviewing #TwitterFiles, but we delve into these interactions daily.”
When examining Twitter’s “slack throughout the campaign,” Taibi said, “I didn’t find a single mention of a moderation request from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans in general.”
“We saw. It may exist. We were told it does,” Taibbi wrote. “But they weren’t here.”
Taibbi said on Sunday that journalist Bari Weiss “reveals secret internal communications from a key date on January 8th.”
“By Jan. 8, as @BariWeiss explains Sunday, Twitter will receive praise from ‘our partners’ in Washington and the sitting US president will no longer be heard on the platform,” Taibbi added.
The “Twitter file” is part of Musk’s pledge to make Twitter more transparent about its “repression of free speech.” The first article focused on Twitter’s decision to limit the sharing of stories from the New York Post’s Hunter Biden’s laptop in the days leading up to the 2020 election.
The second article Weiss released focused on the secret Twitter “Trends Blacklist”, Libs of Tik Tok and Dr. Jay, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine who spoke out against the COVID-19 lockdown. It included accounts such as Bhattacharya.
Another “Twitter Files” article will be released on Saturday by Michael Shellenberger detailing “the turmoil within Twitter on January 7th.”
Follow Samuel Smith on Twitter. @IamSamSmithor Facebook: SamuelSmithCP.
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