The hits from the "Twitter Files" keep coming, and the fourth installment was no different -- it told a frightening tale of just how far the left went to censor former President Donald Trump.
According to Breitbart, it was so bad that Twitter even violated its own policies and made up others just to punish Trump at the time.
Substack journalist Michael Shellenberger was tasked with narrating the fourth document dump on Saturday night.
Most of the documents revealed the internal discussions and decisions that took place after the Capitol incursion on Jan. 6.
The story is long, but in a nutshell, Twitter executives reportedly were under extreme pressure to take action against Trump, who happened to be the sitting U.S. president at the time. As we all know, Twitter twerps eventually canceled him.
According to Shellenberger's review of the documents, which were presumably never meat to see the light of day, it was clear that Twitter took unprecedented actions against the former president, including creating policies to treat Trump distinctly different than other political leaders.
On Jan 7, senior Twitter execs:
- create justifications to ban Trump
- seek a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders
- express no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban
This #TwitterFiles is reported with @lwoodhouse
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 10, 2022
Breitbart added: "During this time, then-CEO Jack Dorsey was on vacation and appeared to delegate much of the decision-making to other top executives including Global Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth and Head of Legal, Policy, & Trust Vijaya Gadde, the platform’s censorship queen."
Dorsey was on vacation in French Polynesia the week of January 4-8, 2021. He phoned into meetings but also delegated much of the handling of the situation to senior execs @yoyoel , Twitter’s Global Head of Trust and Safety, and @vijaya Head of Legal, Policy, & Trust.
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 10, 2022
The people in charge of coming up with a way to ban Trump did it through what was called a "repeat offender for civic integrity" policy, meaning that after five such violations, a user could be censored for it.
Aside from people, conservatives, being censored, Twitter also worked to "deamplify" certain terms that had become popular at the time -- terms that suggested that were related to possible foul play in the 2020 election.
Indeed, notes Roth's colleague, "a quick search of top stop the steal tweets and they’re counterspeech"
But they quickly come up with a solution: "deamplify accounts with stopthesteal in the name/profile" since "those are not affiliated with counterspeech" pic.twitter.com/BjVvtAhLtw
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 11, 2022
"Kraken" and "Stop The Steal" were terms used by those referring to the actions of one of Trump's former attorneys who claimed she had evidence to prove that the election was rigged in Joe Biden's favor.
There's no telling what other terms and phrases had made Twitter's new language blacklist.
