The latest batch of internal messages from Twitter confirm what we already know — totalitarian leftists ran the company. So perhaps the most significant points in Bari Weiss’s Part 5 of the Twitter Files are revelations about the dangerous people Twitter didn’t ban before and after deep-sixing President Trump’s account.
Indeed, Twitter leftists don’t appear even to have considered banning the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei when he called for the extermination of Israel. Nor did they care about another Muslim’s plea to massacre the French.
Trump was their obsession.
Twitter Execs Knew Trump Did Not Violate Its Rules
That obsession led to Trump’s suspension on January 8 after two tweets.
“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,” Trump wrote. “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
Trump also announced he would not attend the inauguration of President Biden.
Obsessed as most were, at least one Twitter employee was quite concerned about suspending POTUS 45, Weiss disclosed.
“Maybe because I am from China,” an employee wrote in an internal message, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.”
The response, in so many words, was that Twitter is a private company, not the government, and could censor voices it didn’t like.
“Voices like that one appear to have been a distinct minority within the company,” Weiss wrote. “Across Slack channels, many Twitter employees were upset that Trump hadn’t been banned earlier.”
After January 6, Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump. “There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,” said one Twitter employee.
“We have to do the right thing and ban this account,” said one staffer.
It’s “pretty obvious he’s going to try to thread the needle of incitement without violating the rules,” said another.
Then again, some Twitter employees said Trump’s post January 6 tweets weren’t “incitement,” the messages show:
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.”
But the Twitter staff assigned to evaluate tweets quickly concluded that Trump had *not* violated Twitter’s policies. “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote one staffer.
“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.”
Another staffer agreed: “Don’t see the incitement angle here.”
Even top Twitter exec Anika Navaroli didn’t believe Trump’s tweets violated the platform’s rules. “I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet.” Her team, she wrote, “found no vios,” meaning violations.
Despite all that, Twitter banned Trump on January 8.
Those Twitter Didn’t Ban
So Trump’s tweets clearly didn’t violate Twitter policy, but he was still suspended. Yet other tweets from foreign leaders or public figures that clearly did violate Twitter policy invited neither censorship nor suspension, Weiss observed.
“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,” she wrote.
“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,” Weiss continued. “Twitter neither deleted the tweet nor banned the Ayatollah.”
And there’s more:
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.
Those tweets appeared before Trump’s. Surely, if something similar appeared after Trump’s suspension, Twitter would delete the tweet and suspend the account.
Not so, Weiss reported:
In early February 2021, [Indian] 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.
These facts lead to one conclusion: Twitter execs were never worried about tweets that “incite” or “glorify violence,” or any other violation of policy, but instead were obsessed, again, with Trump.
That is why he, and not those who clearly called for violence, was banned.
That obsession, and the burning desire to help elect Biden, also explains the decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, and its major blacklisting operation that targeted conservatives.
More on the Twitter Files:
Key Twitter Exec Behind Trump Ban Was GOP, Trump-hater Roth
Twitter Files Detail Trump Suspension, Regular Meetings With FBI, DHS
Twitter Blacklist Operation Exposed in Second Dump of “Twitter Files”
Musk Releases “Twitter Files” That Detail Effort to Block Hunter Biden Laptop Story
