By Carlos Esteban*
This past Saturday, the American journalist Michael Shellenberger published the fourth chapter of the ‘soap opera’ of the ‘Twitter Files‘ in which the manipulation and censorship operations of the social network in favor of radical left-wing causes are revealed.
This chapter, specifically, tells how the decision was reached to expel President Trump from Twitter, still in office, on January 7, 2020.
In a recently published thread, Shellenberger claims that following the events of January 6 on Capitol Hill, Twitter faced enormous pressure to censor and remove Trump from the network for security reasons.
During this time, then-CEO Jack Dorsey was on vacation and appeared to delegate much of the decision-making to other senior executives, including global head of trust and safety Yoel Roth and legal director Vijaya Gadde.
On January 7, Dorsey sent an email to employees saying the platform should abide by its policy of not preventing temporarily banned users from returning within the stipulated ‘punishment’ period. Roth assured an employee that “those who care about such things … are not happy with where we are.”
Later, Roth enthused his colleagues by broadcasting, “GUESS WHAT. Jack just passed a civic integrity recidivism rule. This would allow Twitter to create a system where five rule violations would result in a permanent suspension.”
Roth’s colleagues then consulted him about “incitement to violence” and on January 8 Twitter announced a permanent ban on Trump’s account due to the “risk of further incitement to violence.
“Twitter once said that the ban was based “specifically on how [Trump’s tweets] are received and interpreted,” but Shellenberger notes that in 2019, Twitter stated that it had “not attempted to determine all possible interpretations of the content or its intent.”
In another discussion, Roth asks a colleague to add the tags “stopthesteal” and “Kraken” to a blacklist of terms that will essentially disappear from the web unless specifically searched for.
Shellenberger ends the thread by noting that Facebook’s suspension of former President Trump and his willingness to ignore his own rules put the final nail in the coffin for Trump’s return to Twitter.
With information from La Gaceta
* Carlos Esteban, 58 years old, fifteen years at the leading economic daily EXPANSIÓN, then part of the Recoletos Group, the last three years as head of Interactive Services on the newspaper’s website. Then in Intereconomía, where I founded the Catholic weekly ALBA, I wrote the opinion in ÉPOCA, where I also covered the International section, for which I was responsible when La Gaceta was born (as a generalist newspaper). For the last few years, I have worked freelance, collaborating with different media.
Join us on Telegram: t.me/theriotimes