TWITTER FILES Pt. 5: Behind the Scenes of Trump’s Final Days on Twitter

1. On the morning of January 8, President Donald Trump, with one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension from Twitter, tweets twice.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

3. 7:44 am: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” pic.twitter.com/bRF7O4Ijcf

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

5. “Our mission is to provide a forum that enables people to be informed and to engage their leaders directly,” the company wrote in 2019. Twitter’s aim was to “protect the public’s right to hear from their leaders and to hold them to account.”https://t.co/rtQjkQQxSs

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

7. There were dissenters inside Twitter.

“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee on January 7, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.” pic.twitter.com/LtonK0gfS3

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

9. After January 6, Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump. “There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,” said one Twitter employee. pic.twitter.com/x9Xty6ndYP

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

11. In the early afternoon of January 8, The Washington Post published an open letter signed by over 300 Twitter employees to CEO Jack Dorsey demanding Trump’s ban. “We must examine Twitter’s complicity in what President-Elect Biden has rightly termed insurrection.”

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

13. “It's pretty clear he's saying the ‘American Patriots’ are the ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that, right?) from Wednesday.”

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

15. “I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet,” wrote Anika Navaroli, a Twitter policy official. “I’ll respond in the elections channel and say that our team has assessed and found no vios”—or violations—“for the DJT one.” pic.twitter.com/DnJk2UUuf6

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

17. (Later, Navaroli would testify to the House Jan. 6 committee:“For months I had been begging and anticipating and attempting to raise the reality that if nothing—if we made no intervention into what I saw occuring, people were going to die.”)

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

19. To understand Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, we must consider how Twitter deals with other heads of state and political leaders, including in Iran, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

21. In October 2020, the former Malaysian Prime Minister said it was “a right” for Muslims to “kill millions of French people.”

Twitter deleted his tweet for “glorifying violence,” but he remains on the platform. The tweet below was taken from the Wayback Machine: pic.twitter.com/7tgxgCw9I9

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

23. In October 2021, Twitter allowed Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to call on citizens to take up arms against the Tigray region.

Twitter allowed the tweet to remain up, and did not ban the prime minister. pic.twitter.com/DThmGsJM1r

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

25. But Twitter executives did ban Trump, even though key staffers said that Trump had not incited violence—not even in a “coded” way.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

27. A few minutes later, Twitter employees on the “scaled enforcement team” suggest that Trump’s tweet may have violated Twitter’s Glorification of Violence policy—if you interpreted the phrase “American Patriots” to refer to the rioters. pic.twitter.com/Wszq4zBqnW

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

29. Two hours later, Twitter executives host a 30-minute all-staff meeting.

Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde answer staff questions as to why Trump wasn’t banned yet.

But they make some employees angrier.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

31. Dorsey requested simpler language to explain Trump’s suspension.

Roth wrote, “god help us [this] makes me think he wants to share it publicly” pic.twitter.com/KTMumR0rDD

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

33. Many at Twitter were ecstatic. pic.twitter.com/wgxuwQBLkU

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

35. By the next day, employees expressed eagerness to tackle “medical misinformation” as soon as possible: pic.twitter.com/kJKqZaSekt

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

37. But Twitter’s COO Parag Agrawal—who would later succeed Dorsey as CEO—told Head of Security Mudge Zatko: “I think a few of us should brainstorm the ripple effects” of Trump's ban. Agrawal added: “centralized content moderation IMO has reached a breaking point now.” pic.twitter.com/8f5bSXRKk5

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

39. Macron told an audience he didn’t “want to live in a democracy where the key decisions” were made by private players. “I want it to be decided by a law voted by your representative, or by regulation, governance, democratically discussed and approved by democratic leaders.”

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

40. Merkel’s spokesperson called Twitter’s decision to ban Trump from its platform “problematic” and added that the freedom of opinion is of “elementary significance.”

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny criticized the ban as “an unacceptable act of censorship.”

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

42. From the outset, our goal in investigating this story was to discover and document the steps leading up to the banning of Trump and to put that choice into context.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

44. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022

45. This was reported by @ShellenbergerMD, @IsaacGrafstein, @SnoozyWeiss, @Olivia_Reingold, @petersavodnik, @NellieBowles. Follow all of our work at The Free Press: @TheFP

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022