The decision to ban President Trump from Twitter on January 8, 2021, two days after the mostly peaceful protest at the U.S. Capitol, grew out of an “intellectual framework” that took shape during the four years of his presidency.
That, and the strange pride Twitter enforcer Yoel Roth took in meeting with the FBI and other federal agencies about who and what to ban on Twitter, is the latest from Matt Taibbi on the platform’s censorship operation. Two more installments about Trump are ahead.
The upshot of the reports thus far: They show how dangerous leftists such as Roth are when they control a major communications platform. They shut down speech they don’t like.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk called the suppression what it was: “election interference.”
Get Trump
But targeting the president of the United States after he told his supporters to go home and stay peaceful seemed to have been the acme of Twitter’s targeting conservatives and Republicans.
“Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import,” Taibbi wrote:
Even Twitter’s employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech.
An internal message shows one executive asking whether a head of state had ever been banned.
But no sooner had Roth, head of “trust and safety”; India-born Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal chief; and other Twitter leftists exiled Trump than they began to flex their muscles.
“As soon as they finished banning Trump, Twitter execs started processing new power,” Taibbi continued:
They prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses — perhaps even Joe Biden. The “new administration,” says one exec, “will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.”
Trump was removed, the files show, not just because of tweets connected to the January 6 protest. Instead, the execs reached the logical end of what they had planned for years. They hung their hat on January 6.
“Context matters and the narrative that trump and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and frankly last 4+ years must be taken into account when interpreting and analyzing that tweet,” an exec wrote to Gadde. “I believe that this tweet does violate our rules when taking that historical context + current climate into account.”
Twitter removed Trump’s tweet that contained video of his urging supporters to stay peaceful and go home.
Twitter exiled Trump on January 8.
FBI, DHS Meetings
Internal Slack messages also show “Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies,” Taibbi averred:
[E]xecutives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content.
As well, a “post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI),” Taibbi reported:
So Roth, a homosexual who wrote his doctoral dissertation on “gay” dating websites, regularly met with the nation’s top security, intelligence, and law enforcement officials to help direct a censorship operation that mostly targeted the platform’s conservative users.
Also heavily involved was Gadde, the Indian immigrant who bragged about her power to censor Americans on Twitter.
If Twitter censored material at the behest of the federal government, it might well be found to have violated the free speech protections of the First Amendment.
Shut Down the Right
Trump aside, Roth and Gadde were heavily involved in Twitter’s censorship of conservatives, and of course the Hunter Biden laptop story, as the first two installments about the Twitter files show.
Former New York Times writer Bari Weiss disclosed Twitter’s blacklisting operation, which targeted prominent conservatives such as Dan Bongino and a professor at Stanford University who tweeted that the Covid lockdown would harm children.
Twitter also targeted the Libs of TikTok Twitter feed, and permitted users to dox and harass the account’s founder, Chaya Raichik.
In the first story about the files, Taibbi detailed Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story at the request of the Biden presidential campaign.
Shortly after that story, Musk fired Twitter General Counsel James Baker, the former FBI general counsel involved in the Russian Collusion Hoax.
He also fired Gadde and former CEO Parag Agrawal, who took over from Jack Dorsey. Roth quit Twitter in November, then finally confessed that he erred in helping to suppress the laptop story.
As for Musk, his releasing the files and disclosing the details about Twitter’s suppression of conservatives and news harmful to Biden doesn’t mean he’s a conservative. It does mean Twitter’s election interference may be over, though.
“Do I think Trump would have lost anyway?” he tweeted:
Yes. And, as a reminder, I supported Biden, [Hillary] and Obama.
Nonetheless, election interference by social media companies obviously undermines the public’s faith in democracy and is wrong.
