Trump ban motivated Twitter operatives to censor medical content, files suggest
Former Twitter operatives were motivated to censor "medical misinformation” following their successful ban of President Trump last year, the new tranche of Twitter Files suggest.
The trove of internal Twitter communications released by journalist Bari Weiss Monday show that Twitter executives banned Trump on January 8, 2021, even after admitting the president had not violated the company’s policies.
Following the events on January 6th, Twitter employees were in a flurry trying to find a reason to permanently ban Trump. Three hundred staffers reportedly wrote a letter to then-CEO Jack Dorsey, demanding Trump’s permanent suspension.
They ultimately seized upon a tweet by Trump on January 8th about the “American patriots” who voted for him:
“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!!!”
The social media company’s staffers desperately probed to categorize the tweet as “incitement to violence,” which would justify a ban, but even they were unable to make the connection.
“I don’t see the incitement of fear,” one staffer wrote. “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote another. “Don’t see the incitement angle here,” replied another.
“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 [violations] for the DJT one.”
Shortly after, however, Twitter’s Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde reached out to the team to ask if Trump’s tweet, which she admitted “isn’t a rule violation on its face,” could be categorized as “coded incitement to violence.” She suggested trying to find a sinister definition for the term “American patriots”.
A staffer responded they would look into it, even offering to run a “survey” to get the answer they wanted, though Gadde recommended against it.
The policy team ultimately settled on interpreting “American patriots” as the January 6th attendees, and also decided that Trump was “the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.”
The decision was made and Trump was summarily banned from the platform.
Messages show that Twitter employees were ecstatic, thanking each other and calling it “a piece of history.”
But the operatives, exhilarated from the arbitrary ban, quickly began to spiral and pushed for banning other accounts as well.
“Don Jr’s account needs to be locked too,” wrote an employee.
“Big props to whoever in trust and safety is sitting there whack-a-mole-ing these trump accounts,” wrote another.
By the next day, they were clamoring to censor medical misinformation “as soon as possible.”
“COVID is one specific disease; medical misinformation is a much broader category of harmful content,” wrote one operative. “We’ve laid a lot of groundwork for policy and product behavior through our work on COVID and the election; the Misinfo Policy team . . . along with the folks in Health Experience, TwS, Research, and other teams across the company are now focused on getting to a place of improved maturity in how our policies are actualized (across reporting, operations, global scale, scope, etc.).”
