Independent author Michael Shellenberger published Part 4 of the “Twitter Files” on Saturday night, following a week of significant revelations about the political activities that transpired under the former leadership of the influential social media company.
Shellenberger, Taibbi, and a number of other journalists has had access to internal company communications outlining Twitter’s approach to information moderation during the times predating new CEO Elon Musk’s October takeover.
Shellenberger said late Saturday the internal communications showed that Twitter leadership had decided to pursue a change of policy “for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders,” and that they expressed “no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban.”
Following the events of Jan. 6, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was facing growing internal and external pressure to ban Trump from the platform, Shellenberger said.
Trump was demonized among Democrats, which was the political preference among most of Twitter’s staff and senior executives. “In 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, & 99% of Twitter staff’s political donations went to Democrats,” according to Shellenberger.
Voices pressuring Dorsey to remove Trump after the events of Jan. 6 included former First Lady Michelle Obama, tech journalist Kara Swisher, and the Jewish NGO Anti-Defamation League, among many others, Shellenberger noted.
Because Dorsey was on vacation, he “delegated much of the handling of the situation” to senior Twitter executives at the time. They were Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, and Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former head of legal policy and trust.
Roth had publicly acknowledged his anti-Trump views on Twitter many times. He had posted in 2017 that there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE,” in reference to President Trump.
Shellenberger said Roth was “excited to share” that Dorsey approved a decision for Twitter to introduce a new policy that would allow it to permanently ban users who are considered a “repeat offender for civic integrity.”
“The new approach would create a system where five violations (‘strikes’) would result in permanent suspension,” according to Shellenberger.
“The exchange between Roth and his colleagues makes clear that they had been pushing [Dorsey] for greater restrictions on the speech Twitter allows around elections,” Shellenberger commented.
He cited what a member of Roth’s Trust and Safety Team wrote on Jan. 7 in response to Dorsey’s approval of the new policy: “Progress! Does this affect our approach to Trump, who I think that we publicly said had one remaining strike?”
“Trump continues to have his one strike,” Roth responded. “This is for everything else.”
Lower Level Employee Expressed Concern
“The *only* serious concern we found expressed within Twitter over the implications for free speech and democracy of banning Trump came from a junior person in the organization,” Shellenberger said. “It was tucked away in a lower-level Slack channel known as ’site-integrity-auto.'”The message from the junior employee reads: “This might be an unpopular opinion but one off ad hoc decisions like this that don’t appear rooted in policy are imho a slippery slope... This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world - which seems unsustainable.”
The same employee had written earlier in the day that their concern is “specifically surrounding the unarticulated logic of the decision by [Facebook],” which suggests the idea or “conspiracy theory” that “all social media heads and internet moguls at every layer sit around like kings casually deciding what people can and cannot see.”
The employee said they believed the situation is “unhelpful to the internet ecosystem as a whole.”
Twitter Files
Upon his takeover, Musk promised to provide transparency surrounding Twitter’s practices for managing information on the platform, following extensive complaints over censorship of political speech—allegations that leadership staff at Twitter have previously denied.Regarding the unfolding insights from the internal communications, Musk said, “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene.”
“The problem is, do we have the capacity to have representative government in a time where one political identity controls overtly and covertly the majority of information dissemination in our nation, if not the world?”
