Rachel Lang
Bari Weiss of The Free Press shared a Twitter thread after examining internal discussions and documentation from within the social media site.
She revealed that staffers believed tweets written by Trump around the events of the January 6 Capitol riots had not actually violated Twitter's rules.
This is despite the site saying that the then-US President had violated its policies at the time.
"For years, Twitter had resisted calls both internal and external to ban Trump on the grounds that blocking a world leader from the platform or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information that people should be able to see and debate," Weiss wrote.
"But after January 6, as @mtaibbi and @shellenbergermd have documented, pressure grew, both inside and outside of Twitter, to ban Trump."
She also referred to 'dissenters' within Twitter that did not want to ban Trump.
One dissenter included in the thread wrote: "Maybe because I am from China. I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation."
Weiss continued: "But voices like that one appear to have been a distinct minority within the company. Across Slack channels, many Twitter employees were upset that Trump hadn’t been banned earlier."
"After January 6, Twitter employees organised to demand their employer ban Trump. ‘There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,’ said one Twitter employee."
Musk responded to the new batch of Twitter files, saying: "Under pressure from hundreds of activist employees, Twitter deplatforms Trump, a sitting US President, even though they themselves acknowledge that he didn’t violate the rules."
The Twitter Files are a series of Twitter threads based on internal Twitter, Inc. documents shared by owner Elon Musk with freelance journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and author Michael Shellenberger in December 2022
Donald Trump and Twitter have been approached for comment.
Topics: Donald Trump, Twitter, Elon Musk, US News, Social Media, News