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Dec. 15, 2022 - Epoch Times
14:58
New Files Expose Secret 'Inside Meetings' Where Twitter ‘Invented’ a Reason to Ban Trump
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For the last two or so weeks, Elon Musk has been exposing Twitter one bombshell at a time, and showing the world exactly the type of censorship that Twitter was engaging in prior to his takeover.
And one of the most shocking treasure trove of documents that have been released thus far has to do with the deplatforming of President Trump.
That's because over the past two or so years now, the official line has been that President Trump broke Twitter's policy by inciting a call to violence.
That was at least the official reason that was given to the world as to why he was kicked off the platform.
But these files paint a much different picture.
They show that even within the company, it was clear to almost everyone involved that President Trump did not actually violate any Twitter policies.
And so, what they did was essentially invent out of thin air a new reason to ban him anyway.
However, let me back up for a quick moment and set the stage free properly regarding what these documents actually reveal.
And I hope that if you appreciate content like this, you take a moment to smash, smash, smash that like button, and also smash that subscribe button, that way you can get these types of news feeds every time we publish them.
Now, to start with, over his entire four-year-long presidency, there were calls from both inside as well as outside of Twitter to have President Trump kicked off the platform.
However, to their credit, Twitter took the official public position of resisting those calls by saying that they can't and shouldn't block a public leader from the global discussion.
Here was, for instance, a public policy statement That was released by Twitter back in the year 2018.
Here's what it said, quote, Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate.
It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.
However, leading up to the 2020 election, well, these newly revealed documents show that high-level executives within the company, meaning within Twitter, began to have regular meetings with U.S. intelligence agencies, including the DHS and the FBI.
And furthermore, the documents show that these regular meetings were among other things, meant to allow the FBI to tell Twitter which posts they wanted to have taken down.
And it appears that Twitter was in fact compliant, evidenced by the many instances of them going ahead and apparently doing what the intelligence services asked them to do, such as to add labels to certain tweets, to minimize the reach of certain individuals, or even to suspend certain accounts altogether.
So that was all happening already in the lead-up to the election.
But after the 2020 election, the chorus only grew louder.
After the election, there was a cacophony of people within the company, within Twitter, pushing to have Trump kicked off the platform.
And these voices grew exponentially louder after the events of January the 6th.
After that day, the Slack channels were hot with Twitter employees discussing how to ban President Trump, who, for your reference, at that point needed just one more strike before having his account be at risk of permanent suspension.
But the problem was that in order to kick him off, President Trump needed to violate some type of specific Twitter policy.
There needed to be an official justification to kick him off.
And so amidst this backdrop, on January 8th, which is two days after January 6th, President Trump tweeted the following, quote, And then about an hour later, Later he added this, "To all those who have asked, I will not be going to the inauguration on January 20th."
Seems rather innocuous, especially given the fact that around this time of this tweet after January 6th, the legacy media outlets in this country were painting anyone who happened to vote for Trump with a broad brush as essentially a threat to democracy.
However, that's not how the employees over at Twitter saw it.
As you can see up on your screen...
Those two tweets from President Trump lit up the internal Twitter chats, with employees, once again, calling to have him deplatformed due to the so-called coded secret messages within his statement.
Essentially, they were saying that President Trump's two posts, the one about Trump voters and the second one about him not going to the inauguration, were actually, secretly, an incitement to violence.
For instance, one employee, whose name is Redacted, wrote that quote, It's pretty obvious he's going to try to thread the needle of incitement without violating the rules.
Notably, this employee did not elaborate further or provide any evidence of his claim.
Regardless, though, a top-level official within Twitter, Ms.
Anika Navaroli, she investigated the tweet, and she wrote the following within the internal chat.
She added that, She further wrote that, Twitter's safety division later assessed the Trump tweet, the one above, and determined that there is no violation of our policies at this time.
Meaning, that their initial assessment was that the tweet did not violate any Twitter policies, and that it essentially meant what it said.
However, 90 minutes after that initial assessment, Ms.
Vijaya Gare, who at the time was head of Twitter's legal department, she continued to push in this direction and asked whether the message could, in fact, be somehow a secretly coded call to violence.
Here's what she wrote, again, After the initial assessment from Twitter's own safety division had been made, here's what she wrote in an internal chat.
The biggest question is whether a tweet like the one this morning from Trump, which isn't a rule violation on its face, is being used as a coded incitement to further violence.
If you have any context or insight we should consider, I'm all ears.
For instance, use of the term American patriots and they will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape, or form.
Then, according to these documents, about two hours after she posed that question, Twitter executives held a 30-minute all-staff meeting which focused on the question of why Trump hasn't been banned.
And wouldn't you know it, just a few short hours after that meeting, Twitter officially announced that they were suspending President Trump's account, saying, in their public statement at least, that his recent tweets were in violation of the glorification of violence policy.
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And so that's what happened.
Officially, at least, Twitter kicked President Trump off because he violated their policy against the glorification of violence, which sounds pretty bad.
And obviously, the tweets must have been glorifying violence pretty hard in order to get the leader of the free world kicked off of his primary communication channel.
And so, let's take a quick moment to review what those two tweets from President Trump actually said.
Here's the first one.
Then the second one.
To all those who have asked, I will not be going to the inauguration on January 20th.
Okay, so again, they seem rather innocuous on the surface.
And as we mentioned earlier, even Twitter's own internal safety division made the initial assessment that they did not violate Twitter's policies.
So, how specifically did Twitter justify their action?
Well, luckily for us, we have a statement from Twitter which outlines their reasoning, and let's go through it together.
To start with...
Their assessment determined that Trump's last two Twitter posts were, quote, highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the US Capitol on January 6th.
They then further went on to say that they reached this conclusion based on a number of different factors.
The first factor, the first point, says that President Trump's statement about not attending the inauguration is, quote, Now, that seems highly speculative, at least to me, and it's very open to interpretation.
Specifically, at the time, President Trump had roughly 90 million Twitter followers.
And so the fact that a number of his supporters thought this way is a little bit vague, and very notably, Twitter did not offer any specific examples.
Regardless, let's continue, because this release continues.
In their second point, Twitter said that President Trump's statement may also, quote, Again, that could be the case, but that's also highly speculative, evidenced by the fact that in the statement, they use terms like may also serve, as well as potentially considering, and so on and so forth.
Using this logic, you can interpret almost anything that anyone says as a cause to kick them off the platform.
Because anything, theoretically, could be interpreted in any which way.
Regardless, though, the third point in Twitter's justification, which is my favorite in this list of mental gymnastics, is that President Trump's use of the words American patriots when describing his supporters is, That's very cool.
Then in their fourth point, Twitter claimed that when President Trump said that his supporters will have a, quote, giant voice long into the future, and that, quote, they will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape, or form, while those words are being interpreted, at least according to Twitter, as, quote, further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an orderly transition.
In short, summing it all up, Twitter's justification for kicking Trump off the platform was basically to say that President Trump didn't actually threaten violence, but that his words can be interpreted to perhaps be an incitement to violence.
Interpreted by who?
Well, it doesn't necessarily say.
But that's the way that this type of censorship goes.
Essentially, the way that it appears to work, based on years of evidence as well as these new files from inside of Twitter...
Well, there's one group in America which can constantly talk about doing violence to their opponents and have it be brushed off as just being a metaphor, while you have another group that can't even talk about their points of view without having it be essentially called a dog whistle.
Here's a simple example.
In fact, it took me a few minutes to find it because these examples are so ubiquitous.
This is from People of Bernie, a verified account on Twitter, and they wrote this, quote, You're either Antifa or pro-fascism.
There is no middle ground.
The question today isn't which side you are on.
That question has already been answered.
We know who sided with fascism.
Don't let them escape it.
Don't let them escape it.
By that point in time, Antifa had been beating people up, burning down buildings, and one of their professed members had even killed someone over in Portland.
And so by all metrics, that was a threat.
But inside of Twitter, it's not interpreted that way.
It wasn't taken down, because after all, it's just a metaphor.
Another great example was brought forth in a congressional hearing just yesterday, where you had Congresswoman Nancy Mace confront an activist about the rhetoric that she was posting on Twitter.
Take a look.
Only a few weeks after the attempted attack on a Supreme Court justice on June 25th, one of the witnesses, Alejandra Caraballo, tweeted out the following in response to a decision on abortion overturning Roe v.
Wade.
And I'll quote directly from the tweet.
The six justices who overturned Roe should never know peace again.
It is our civic duty to accost them every time they're in public.
They are pariahs.
Since women don't have their rights, these justices should never have a peaceful moment in public again.
So my last question today of Ms.
Caraballo, do you stand by these comments, this kind of rhetoric on social media?
And do you believe it's a threat to democracy?
Thank you, Representative, for the opportunity to clarify and provide context to my tweets.
I have a question.
Is it yes or no?
Do you believe your rhetoric is a threat to democracy when you're calling to accost a branch of government, the Supreme Court?
I don't believe that's a correct characterization of my statements.
Did you not tweet that?
That you thought that the Supreme Court justices should be accosted?
What I'm saying is that is not an accurate characterization of my statements.
On June 8th of this year, a man was arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home in Maryland.
He told law enforcement officers he wanted to kill a Supreme Court justice.
He was found with a knife, with a pistol, two magazines, ammunition, pepper sprays, zip ties, a hammer, crowbar, and duct tape.
And just as you guessed, that tweet, the tweet in that video, was never taken down by Twitter, regardless of the context of real death threats being lobbied against conservative Supreme Court justices.
And regardless of how that tweet might have been interpreted by someone, it still remains up.
That's just how these things work.
And frankly, there are countless examples like this over on Twitter.
And what they all add up to is that when you begin to have the power to ban people based on some interpretation of their speech rather than what they actually said, well, that's fairly dangerous.
And it'll inevitably give huge amounts of censorship power to whoever is controlling the platform because when they want to censor someone, like, for instance, President Trump, they can make up a reason and say that his words can be interpreted as a call to violence.
But when you have an activist...
Tacitly threatening the lives of Supreme Court justices, well, those very same Twitter employees, they can turn right around and say that that tweet didn't have an actual call to violence, and it can be left up no problem.
That's the reality of basing decisions based on things like interpretations rather than facts.
And now, at least thanks to these internal Twitter documents, we know how these things play out.
Apparently, in the upcoming Twitter files, which will be released very soon, they will revolve around Twitter's COVID and vaccine-related censorship, and so I'm looking forward to those.
which will be released very soon, they will revolve around Twitter's COVID and vaccine-related censorship, and so I'm looking forward to those.
Until then, if you'd like to go deeper into anything that we've discussed thus far in today's episode, I'll throw all my research notes down into the description box below so you can peruse them at your own leisure, and all I ask in return is that as you're making your way down there to the description box, if you haven't already, take a quick detour to smash that like button so this video can be shared out to ever more people, and also consider subscribing take a quick detour to smash that like button so this video can be shared out to ever more people, and also consider subscribing to this YouTube channel as well, that we can get this type of
And lastly, I'd like to mention that over on Epic TV, Josh published a phenomenal episode of Crossroads, wherein he goes deep into a case that's currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, a case called Brunson v. Adams.
Adams, and it's a case with serious implications, given the fact that it's at least seeking to overturn the 2020 election.
If you'd like to check out that episode, as well as all the other spectacular content over on Epic TV, I'll throw the link.
It'll be right there at the very top of the description box.
I hope you check it out.
And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times.
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