Push to ban Trump
Lefty staff obsession
The fourth installment of Elon Musk’s bombshell “Twitter Files” reveals how staffers inside the company were pushing for a policy changes just to get then-President Trump banned after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
In a series of tweets, independent journalist Michael Shellenberger shared internal communications among high-level execs surrounding a new rule approved by then-Twitter boss Jack Dorsey that would result in a permanent suspension to accounts with five violations.
“GUESS WHAT,” Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, wrote to colleagues on Jan. 7, 2021, according to a screenshot on an internal message. “Jack just approved repeat offender for civic integrity.”
A colleague then asked if Dorsey’s decision would translate to a Trump ban.
The person also asks, “does the incitement to violence aspect change that calculus?” according to the screenshot.
Roth lets the worker know that the new policy wouldn’t result in Trump’s removal, since the former president “continues to just have his one strike.”
“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,” wrote Shellenberger.
In another shocking Jan. 7 exchange provided by Shellenberger, Roth tells a sales executive that Twitter is “changing” their approach with Trump regarding the company’s long-standing public-interest exceptions policy, which was put in place to provide some protections to content posted by elected officials.
Pressure to ban Trump came from high-level and influential individuals like
Michelle Obama, and from Twitter employees, posts by Shellenberger show.
Shellenberger shared another Roth message stating engineers at the company wanted to permanently ban Trump.
“People who care about this . . . aren’t happy with where we are,” Roth said.
In response, another employee, whose identity was not revealed, noted that while banning Trump’s account might be the “obvious and “simple” answer, there could be roadblocks preventing them from carrying out the plan.
But the next day, on Jan. 8, 2021, the platform announced it was banning
Trump’s account after a review found his tweets may have inspired the attack. Twitter suspended the page “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” it said.
Twitter had previously stated in 2018 that blocking world leaders or removing controversial tweets would “hide important information” and “certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”
Shellenberger wrote that the decision-makers at Twitter expressed “no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban.”
However, at least one junior staffer objected to banning Trump. “This might be an unpopular opinion but one off ad hoc decisions like this that don’t appear rooted in policy are imho [in my honest opinion] a slippery slope and reflect an alternatively unequal dictatorial problem,” the staffer told colleagues on Slack, according to a screenshot shared by Shellenberger.
Saturday’s posts came a week after the first batch of Twitter Files revealed how Democratic insiders collaborated with highlevel Twitter execs to suppress The Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 presidential election.