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Internal Twitter conversations released Friday by reporter Matt Taibbi showed the deliberations that Twitter executives had when deciding to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform in January of 2021.
Trump's account ban was ultimately justified by Twitter executives as looking at the "context surrounding" Trump and his supporters "over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years," one internal conversation shows, according to Taibbi's Twitter thread.
Before the riot on Jan. 6, Twitter was already closely moderating Trump's Twitter account by employing "a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility," Taibbi tweeted. Trump's account was reportedly "covered in bots," with "bot" meaning "any automated heuristic moderation rule," on the day of the riot, according to Taibbi.When the riot began unfolding on Jan. 6, Twitter executives reportedly made "frantic calls" to "start deploying its full arsenal of moderation tools," a tweet posted by Taibbi showing an internal Twitter conversation revealed.Three of Trump's tweets were first "bounced" on Jan. 6 for allegedly making "unfounded claims of voter fraud and election theft,"
according to Taibbi. A "bounce" resulted in a 12-hour ban following the removal of the tweets. "We also have tweeted so there's transparency in our actions and making it clear that future violations of the Twitter Rules will result in permanent suspension," Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde allegedly wrote in a company-wide email at the time.
What happened between Jan. 6 and Jan. 8, the day that Trump was banned from the platform, will be revealed on Sunday, Taibbi said.
A statement from Twitter at the time said that Trump was suspended after the following two tweets: "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!!!" and "to all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."
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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."
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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.
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