The latest installment of Elon Musk’s Twitter Files, a release of extra documents and details regarding the social platform’s internal operations, went into detail about how Twitter handled election-related information in 2020.
Journalist Matt Taibbi posted details from the company’s internal communications on Friday about how the company’s team of executives, which Taibbi dubbed a “high-speed Supreme Court of moderation,” made decisions about election-related content during the 2020 election. The thread is part of a series of releases related to Twitter’s permanent suspension of former President Donald Trump.
“We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6,” Taibbi said. “Decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies.”
CRITICS SEEK EVIDENCE OF GOVERNMENT INVOLVEMENT IN TWITTER CENSORSHIP DECISIONS
1. THREAD: The Twitter Files
THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP
Part One: October 2020-January 6th— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022
“As soon as they finished banning Trump, Twitter execs started processing new power,” Taibbi charged, alleging that the ban gave Twitter unfettered power over the executive office. “They prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses – perhaps even Joe Biden.”
The journalist claimed this while also posting a screenshot from an unknown Twitter employee showing that Twitter was willing to suspend or limit government-operated Twitter accounts if they were used for “evading a ban.”
6. As soon as they finished banning Trump, Twitter execs started processing new power. They prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses – perhaps even Joe Biden. The “new administration,” says one exec, “will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.” pic.twitter.com/lr66YgDlGy
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022
The decision to remove Trump from Twitter was based on “the overall context and narrative” that the original offending tweets occurred in, according to one employee. The decision was made based on an “intellectual framework” that Twitter had developed, according to Taibbi.
Taibbi also said certain content moderation decisions were made by key Twitter executives, including former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth, former Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde, and former legal counsel Jim Baker. The group’s approach was a “high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President,” Taibbi claims.
Roth also met with officials from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to discuss election security on a weekly basis. He also posted details about a Slack channel in which Twitter employees debated details about whether to moderate certain tweets in relation to election misinformation. For example, Taibbi notes an exchange regarding a tweet in which former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) joked about mailing in ballots for his “deceased parents and grandparents.”
“I agree it’s a joke,” a Twitter employee said, “but he’s also literally admitting in a tweet a crime.”
These decisions were made in an attempt to regulate Trump’s efforts to affect the 2020 election. “Twitter, in 2020 at least, was deploying a vast range of visible and invisible tools to rein in Trump’s engagement, long before J6. The ban will come after other avenues are exhausted,” Taibbi concluded.
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Twitter’s team panicked on Jan. 6, according to Taibbi. The company’s “executives on day 1 of the January 6th crisis at least tried to pay lip service to its dizzying array of rules. By day 2, they began wavering. By day 3, a million rules were reduced to one: what we say, goes,” the journalist said.
Taibbi’s post is the latest in a series of threads posted by him and fellow reporter Bari Weiss regarding the internal machinations of Twitter. Weiss published details about Twitter’s “blacklist” policy on Thursday, while Taibbi provided details about the website’s ban on a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. The results have been contested, with critics arguing that the Twitter Files have not revealed any new information about the platform.
