Twitter executives decided to ban then-President Donald Trump from their social media platform after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol partly over what one executive called the “context” of actions by him and his supporters, the most recent report authorized by latest company CEO Elon Musk reveals.
In a series of tweets Friday evening, independent journalist Matt Taibbi posted redacted messages that he said showed “the interior debate resulting in Trump’s ban.”
One message said, “we currently analyze tweets and consider them at a tweet-by-tweet basis which doesn’t appropriately have in mind the context surrounding.”
It continued, “you should use the yelling fire right into a crowded theater example — context matters and the narrative that trump and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and albeit last 4+ years have to be taken under consideration.”
Taibbi said the messages showed how Twitter’s internal standards eroded in the course of the months leading as much as Jan. 6, with high-ranking executives violating their very own policies while interacting with various federal agencies.
“Before J6, Twitter was a singular mixture of automated, rules-based enforcement, and more subjective moderation by senior executives,” he wrote.
“Because the election approached, senior executives — perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed — increasingly struggled with rules, and started to talk of ‘vios’ [violations] as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.”
Taibbi’s tweets got here a day after fellow independent journalist Bari Weiss posted photos showing how Twitter used secret tools to “shadow ban” certain users and suppress their posts on the platform.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was placed on Twitter’s “Trends Blacklist” after arguing against COVID-19 lockdowns, leading him to tweet Thursday, “I’m inquisitive about what role the federal government played in Twitter’s suppression of covid policy discussion.”
“We are going to see with time, I suppose,” he added.
Conservative commentators Dan Bongino, a Fox News host, and radio host and conservative activist Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA were also placed on a “Search Blacklist” and slapped with a “Do Not Amplify” label, respectively.
Bongino fumed on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Thursday night that his treatment was “some Soviet-style bulls–t” and Kirk tweeted Friday, “We’ll never understand how different the country can be had they never put their thumb on the size.”
“All of that is evil, un-American, and it ought to be criminal,” Kirk added.
