Twitter Files Part 5 has just been released by Bari Weiss, which explains the removal of President Trump from Twitter.
The short version is that Twitter found that Trump’s tweets on the morning of January 8th, 2021 did NOT violate their policies against incitement.
But because Twitter employees were advocating for Trump to banned because of the ‘totality’ of his tweets, the higher ups at Twitter banned him.
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
Here’s the full Twitter thread from Bari:
THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART FIVE.
THE REMOVAL OF TRUMP FROM TWITTER.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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
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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
6. But after January 6, as @mtaibbi and @shellenbergermd have documented, pressure grew, both inside and outside of Twitter, to ban Trump.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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. pic.twitter.com/9vgvSgqJBB
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
14. Another staffer agreed: “Don’t see the incitement angle here.” pic.twitter.com/6mbUU2Tma0
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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.” pic.twitter.com/wMQ68Hu2xA
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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” pic.twitter.com/zdxSsG1UBS
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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. pic.twitter.com/D6Cb1F05sY
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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. pic.twitter.com/s7dyDlNbaS
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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.” pic.twitter.com/llJRMfpOPi
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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.” pic.twitter.com/QD4DvrUEhO
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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. pic.twitter.com/cm5yzuSYSV
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
32. One hour later, Twitter announces Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
34. And congratulatory: “big props to whoever in trust and safety is sitting there whack-a-mole-ing these trump accounts” pic.twitter.com/8ZssvH9ooH
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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.” pic.twitter.com/0g6aptJHJg
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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.”
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
44. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
45. This was reported by @ShellenbergerMD, @IsaacGrafstein, @SnoozyWeiss, @Olivia_Reingold, @petersavodnik, @NellieBowles. Follow all of our work at The Free Press: @TheFP
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022