Twitter's silencing of Donald Trump

During the run-up to the 2016 election, Donald Trump used Twitter brilliantly.
He had a talent for writing messages that were interesting or outrageous enough to cause TV news producers to drop whatever they were going to cover in the next segment to talk about Trump instead.

The messages were calibrated to break through the clutter, and the targeting was precise. Tweets sent in the middle of the night were perfectly timed to blow up the rundown of the broadcast and cable network's morning news/talk shows and change the subject of the day's news coverage to whatever talking points Trump wanted front and center.
Trump communicated with millions of voters directly from his phone to theirs, and that was news in itself as he rose in the polls and closed in on the Republican nomination for president. He could not be ignored.

Now we're learning how Twitter employees felt about that.

After tech billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, he opened the company's internal communications files, going all the way back to 2006, to a group of independent journalists including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger.
The files show that the decision to ban the sitting president of the United States from Twitter wasn't based only on his tweets on or around the events of January 6. One communication between employees during the internal discussion about banning Trump cites the need to take into account "the narrative that Trump and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and frankly the last 4+ years."

We know now how some of those friends were treated by Twitter employees. The internal files reveal that the company used "visibility filtering" to minimize the reach of individual users, particularly conservatives, even though company officials repeatedly denied doing so. "In 2018," reported Bari Weiss, "Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (head of Product) said: 'We do not shadow ban.' They added: 'And we certainly don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.'"

But that's exactly what they did. As the 2020 election approached, Twitter executives regularly acted on "moderation" requests from the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee. (Matt Taibbi reported that in all the internal messages related to Twitter's "election enforcement," the journalists "didn't see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House or Republicans generally.")

"Senior Twitter execs censored tweets by Trump in the run-up to the Nov 2020 election while regularly engaging with representatives of U.S. government law enforcement agencies," Michael Shellenberger summed up.
The law enforcement agencies were closely involved in Twitter's decision to suppress content that was troublesome for the Biden campaign, the truthful New York Post reporting about emails on Hunter Biden's laptop that suggested a pattern of influence peddling by the Biden family.

The picture that emerges from the Twitter files is one of a workforce seething with anti-Trump agitprop long before the events of Jan. 6.
Back in January 2018, the Twitter Public Policy account responded to what it called "a lot of discussion about political figures and world leaders on Twitter" by stating the company's policy against blocking world leaders. "Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate," the company wrote.

But the rules were different for President Donald Trump. In one internal discussion, an employee refers to a ban on Trump as "the thing everyone wants."
Bari Weiss reported that "after January 6, Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump."
"On Jan. 7," reported Michael Shellenberger, "senior Twitter execs: create justifications to ban Trump; seek a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders; express no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban."

On the morning of Jan. 8, Trump sent out a tweet that included the phrase, "the 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me." Twitter employees debated whether "American Patriots" was coded language for incitement to violence.
Twitter policy official Anika Navaroli concluded that the "American Patriots" tweet was not "clear or coded incitement" and said her team found no violations of policy in it.

A second tweet from Trump that morning, stating that he would not be attending the inauguration, was also determined by the safety team not to be a violation.
But another team inside Twitter argued that "American Patriots" might violate the "Glorification of Violence" policy if interpreted to refer to the Jan. 6 rioters. Bari Weiss reported that members of the team viewed Trump as "the leader of a terrorist group" and compared him to Hitler. When upper management would not immediately agree to ban Trump, Twitter executive Yoel Roth wrote that "multiple" employees "have quoted the Banality of Evil suggesting that people implementing our policies are like Nazis following orders."

"The Banality of Evil" was author Hannah Arendt's description of the "thoughtlessness" of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat responsible for organizing the transportation of millions of Jews and others to death camps as part of Hitler's "Final Solution."
Yes, Twitter employees equated Trump's description of his 75 million voters as "American Patriots" to the Holocaust. And about an hour later, Twitter announced that it was permanently banning Trump from the platform "due to the risk of further incitement of violence."

The journalists examining the Twitter files detail a long list of world leaders who were not suspended or banned from Twitter for writing direct calls for violence and genocide, including Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called Israel "a malignant cancerous tumor" that has to be "eradicated." Also allowed to remain on the platform: former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who tweeted, "Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past."

But they're not Donald Trump, whose horrifying and unforgivable sin, in the eyes of the overwhelmingly Democratic employees of Twitter, was to use their free-speech platform creatively, aggressively and successfully as part of his campaign to win the GOP nomination, defeat Hillary Clinton and become the 45th president of the United States.

This article was published in the Redlands Daily Facts, Redlands, Calif. and distributed by Tribune Content Agency.