Journalist Matt Taibbi discovered a double standard being used by Twitter administrators on Friday, whereby Republican users were called out for similar language, but leftist leaders’ comments regarding the 2020 election went unchallenged. It seems that prejudice is still present at one of the largest names in computing when it comes to claims about electoral conspiracies.
The tweet from former attorney general Eric Holder on October 27 that claimed the Postal Service had been “deliberately crippled” and urged electors to vote in person was first marked with a general caution. Yoel Roth, the head of trust and safety at Twitter, asked for its removal despite the fact that all of the information contained therein was accurate; this was done on the same day that the Supreme Court ruled that Wisconsin election officials could not account for absentee ballots received six days after Election Day.
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Democrats said that the previous government had tampered with postal collection boxes to prevent voting in August of 2020. This implication was credible in part because President Trump has had a contradictory attitude toward mail-in votes throughout his administration, first advocating a veto over USPS funding and then later expressing doubt about widespread mail-in voting.
Twitter executive Alex Roth questioned if there was a rules violation when Rick Rosner tweeted in October 2020 that the then-President Donald Trump and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett would “attempt to #StealOurVotes.” While Patrick Conlon disagreed, claiming that it solely made reference to hypothetical future events, Taibbi was able to ascertain this opinion via internal papers. “Supreme Court decision on processing mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.”
On October 19, the Supreme Court’s decision on a request to block Pennsylvania from counting mail-in votes for Election Day that would come in later days was tied 4-4. There was a request for Justice Barrett, who had just been appointed but had not yet been confirmed, to abstain from voting on the topic of post-election day ballot distribution.
Despite Twitter’s promises of objectivity, a recent analysis by Taibbi found that Republican and conservative leaders were being unfairly assigned ‘labels’ because of their content.
In an attempt to explain its position against misleading information while imposing limitation on President Trump’s own ambiguous warnings over mail-in voting, Twitter recently drew a line by affixing “Stay informed” marks to Republican Georgia Rep. Jody Hice’s flagged tweet addressing postal ballots.
“I think going too far down the rabbit hole of labeling critical speech (e.i. critical of our handling in this case) is dangerous,” In private conversations, Roth acknowledged Taibbi’s preference for a “lenient approach” to the situation, indicating some kind of involvement. “It becomes a self-reinforcing ‘wah wah censorship’ cycle.”
On October 26, 2020, John Basham, a former Tippecanoe County Councilor, tweeted about the security of voting by mail. The Twitter team replied by marking it with an educational icon and informing users that casting an absentee vote is safe. “Between 2% and 25% of Ballots by Mail are Being Rejected for Errors,” Following Taibbi’s surprising admission, an associated tweet was looked into by the FBI. “shredding” of mail-in ballots, which a Twitter staff member said a PolitiFact article had “proven to be false.”
Twitter sent out “a vast range of visible and invisible tools to rein in Trump’s engagement” By January 6, according to Matt Taibbi, the site had several automatic moderation policies in place that were associated with Donald Trump’s account. Users may anticipate a harsher standard of online behavior than previously as a result of these bots.
James Woods, a well-known actor, expressed his worry on Twitter that the internet behemoth had sought to “suppress” President Trump’s remarks on October 26th in an effort to quiet him. This tweet was sent out only one day after the Commander-in-Chief made this possibly divisive statement public on social media.
“Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA. Must have final total on November 3rd.” One Twitter employee recommended in a private chat that they “action him for something worth the fiasco” alternatively, another employee suggested that someone may “hit him hard on future vio with firmer basis,” according to the post by Taibbi.
The Daily Caller News Foundation contacted Twitter and Holder, but neither company responded to the requests for information.
“I guess I wouldn’t have minded Twitter adding a warning to my tweet stating that ‘#StealOurVotes is a prediction, not established fact,’” Rosner told the DCNF. “A little weird, but fine. The Twitter staff’s discussion regarding my tweet implies that I was thinking about a future scenario in which SCOTUS throws out mail-in ballots that arrived after Election Day. My thinking wasn’t that specific. I simply wanted large numbers of people to vote and to get their ballots in on time, so that margins of victory would be large enough to not potentially be overturned by arbitrary court decisions.”
