News/Commentary

Twitter Files uncover plan to ban Trump while allowing world dictators to call for mass murder

December 13, 2022 | | Print Article

The fifth installment of the “Twitter Files” dropped Monday and, as journalist Bari Weiss concluded detailing how the platform permanently banned then-President Donald Trump despite numerous objectives from policy officials, she showcased the actual violent rhetoric of others Twitter allowed to remain.

After fellow “Twitter Files” journalist Michael Shellenberger juxtaposed the public pressures being applied to the Big Tech company alongside the private conversations endeavoring to change policy to justify taking action against Trump on Jan. 7, 2021, Weiss picked up with events from the next day.

Reminding that the president had one strike remaining before risking a ban, she shared the two tweets that Trump posted the morning of Jan. 8.

“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!!!,” he wrote first before adding nearly an hour later, “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

Noting that the descent within Twitter opposed to banning Trump was a “distinct minority” and that “many Twitter employees were upset that Trump hadn’t been banned earlier,” Weiss not only pointed to the objections to any form of censorship that had been posed in internal conversations, she also showed how those responsible for evaluating tweets found nothing wrong with Trump’s posts.

One member of the Twitter staff wrote, “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement…. 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,” and another expressed, “Don’t see the incitement angle here.”

This was quickly followed by Twitter policy official Anika Navaroli stating, “I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet,” and, “I’ll respond in the elections channel and say that our team has assessed and found no vios [violations] for the DJT one.”

For context, Weiss noted how Navaroli would later testify before the Jan. 6 committee that “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 occurring, people were going to die.”

At this point, after showing other officials found nothing wrong with the posts, the journalist brought home the bias of the effort to suppress Trump with a series of tweets from extremist leaders around the world who maintained their access to Twitter before and after his ban, despite actual calls for violence.

“In June 2018, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted, ‘#Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.’ Twitter neither deleted the tweet nor banned the Ayatollah,” Weiss wrote and then, “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.”

She continued, “Muhammadu Buhari, the President of Nigeria, incited violence against pro-Biafra groups. ‘Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war,’ he wrote, ‘will treat them in the language they understand.’ Twitter deleted the tweet but didn’t ban Buhari.”

Furthermore, after the ado had been made over Trump’s innocuous posts that led company heads to permanently ban the president “due to the risk of further incitement of violence, the social media platform allowed, “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,” and, Weiss continued, “In early February 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government threatened to arrest Twitter employees in India, and to incarcerate them for up to seven years after they restored hundreds of accounts that had been critical of him. Twitter did not ban Modi.”

Discussions seeking interpretations of Trump’s language as “coded incitement to further violence,” stood to show that the determination to ban the sitting president from the town square was the objective, it was just a question of managing the delivery of that end.

The lengths taken to remove Trump from Twitter led to further narrative controlling bans as Weiss showed communications from Jan. 9, 2021, where “employees expressed eagerness to tackle ‘medical misinformation’ as soon as possible.”

Overall, this led the journalist to conclude, “Ultimately, the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.”

 

Kevin Haggerty
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