The fifth installment of “The Twitter Files” was made available on Monday. In addition to examining how Donald Trump’s permanent Twitter ban defied multiple demands from policy authorities, journalist Bari Weiss exposed how the site nonetheless allowed provocative language and violent sentiments to circulate unchallenged.
Journalist Melissa Weiss gave a window into what transpired on January 8th, 2021, following Michael Shellenberger’s study of the dynamics at play with Big Tech and its contentious choice to take action against Trump.
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The president was perilously close to being barred as a result of his careless tweeting, which had left him on shaky ground. On the morning of January 8, Trump tweeted two inflammatory tweets that put this last bridge to his demise to the test.
“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.”
Internal Twitter discussions revealed an intriguing dynamic: while the majority of staff members were advocating for a ban on President Trump, there was still a noticeable minority calling to keep him allowed. Despite their concerns, those reviewing his tweets saw nothing wrong with them, therefore they were approved despite the disapproval of the staff.
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.”
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.”
The journalist revealed an unquestionable prejudice against President Trump’s ban that other officials failed to see by exposing extremist leaders from around the world who still had access to Twitter despite the presence of violent content in some of their messages.
“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.”
Twitter let Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi publish violent statements without repercussions, in stark contrast to their staunch opposition to Donald Trump. Twitter refuses to take any action against Prime Minister Modi despite threats from the Indian government to imprison their employees for up to seven years after restoring critical accounts in February 2021.
A agreement emerged from conversations about President Trump’s language: the objective was to establish his exclusion from public debate, but the key lay in finding the appropriate method.
Following Twitter’s unusual move to permanently ban Donald Trump from the service, other social media companies swiftly adopted similar bans to control narratives. This confirmed Jack Dorsey’s assertion from January 9 that these rules needed to be upheld for safety and security reasons, 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.”
