Last night, Matt Taibbi unleashed the third installment of the Twitter files. The main topic of this batch was the inside history of how Twitter wound up banning Donald Trump’s account, a process that involved a lot of hand-waving and “context,” rather than finding that Trump had actually violated any of Twitter’s rules for suppression. The majority of the thread once again didn’t tell us much that we hadn’t already suspected, but simply made it official. The management at Twitter hated Trump with a passion and they were obviously looking for an excuse to ban him after already having hit him with “reduced visibility” flags and other incidents of what Matt described as “subjective moderation.” I was initially disappointed in the topic selection because many of us had been waiting for some official confirmation of the government’s involvement in the censorship process. But whether it was intentional or not, Taibbi eventually slipped in some of the good stuff. The FBI was definitely involved and Yoel Roth mockingly admitted to trying to cover up the company’s interactions with the Bureau. First, here’s part of the internal debate over how to deal with the Bad Orange Man. (NY Post)
In a series of tweets Friday evening, independent journalist Matt Taibbi posted redacted messages that he said showed “the internal debate leading to Trump’s ban.”
One message said, “we currently analyze tweets and consider them at a tweet-by-tweet basis which does not appropriately take into account the context surrounding.”
It continued, “you can use the yelling fire into a crowded theater example — 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.”
As you can see, Twitter never really had a “rules-based” reason for banning Trump’s account. It all came down to “context.” In this case, the “context” was the January 6th riot, which Trump did not take part in nor did he order his followers to attack the capitol, either during his speech or in any tweets. In the end, as Taibbi explains, Twitter’s executives just found pretexts to “do what they’d likely have done anyway.”
As part of that explanation, Matt finally brings up the suggestion of Twitter’s executives being under pressure “from federal agencies” who they were meeting with on a regular basis. So which federal agencies might they be talking about? One of them was definitely the FBI.
“As the election approached, senior executives — perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed — increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of ‘vios’ [violations] as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.”
The released internal communications from Slack accounts show that not only was Yoel Roth meeting with the FBI, but he knew he was doing something wrong. He went to great pains to hide these activities on his company calendar, coming up with other descriptions of meetings to avoid documenting his visits by agents from the Bureau where they discussed Trump. Roth even made mocking jokes about it.
As you can see, Roth was creating “generic” names for the meetings on his calendar. He includes a smiley face icon after saying one meeting was “Definitely Not About Trump.” He is even more emphatic when he mockingly exclaims that he was “DEFINITELY NOT meeting with the FBI I SWEAR.”
This was all a big joke to the leadership at Twitter, but it wasn’t a funny joke. What we’re seeing here is confirmation that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was holding regular meetings with the leadership of one of the largest social media platforms to discuss censorship of not only Donald Trump but of anyone who was critical of Joe Biden, both during the election and after he took office.
And what sort of Tweets was the Biden campaign ordering Twitter to take down prior to the election? Yesterday, I took some of the URLs of tweets that the Biden team had asked Twitter to “handle” for them and fed them into the Wayback Machine. A couple were unavailable, but I found three of them that I posted in a thread yesterday. Predictably, they were tweets about Hunter Biden’s various indiscretions which were clearly very embarrassing for his father.
We can only hope that the new Republican House majority will schedule hearings and investigations into this matter by the appropriate committees. Of course, no matter what they find, the Biden Justice Department won’t take any action or hold anyone accountable, but with luck, that might change after 2024. These people simply can not be allowed to get away with this.
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