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A fifth “Twitter Files” drop was released on Monday with “The Free Press” founder and editor Bari Weiss again carrying on a thread of information related to internal documents from the company at the behest of CEO Elon Musk.
The fifth installment was titled “The Removal of Trump from Twitter,” adding more evidence to the previous four data drops of internal Twitter dialogue surrounding the platform’s bent toward censorship, suppression, and collusion with federal agencies.
In the fifth drop, Weiss detailed the events leading up to Twitter’s infamous decision to ban Trump from the platform, noting that on the morning of Jan. 8, 2021, the president tweeted twice:
Internal conversations between Twitter employees revealed dissension between those who wished to see the president banned and those who did not. The “dissenters” seemed to be outnumbered. “But voices like that one appear to have been a distinct minority within the company,” Weiss pointed out. “Across Slack channels, many Twitter employees were upset that Trump hadn’t been banned earlier.”
She continued, “After January 6, Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump. ‘There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,’ said one Twitter employee.”
Another Twitter staffer wrote that banning Trump’s account would be “the right thing” and that the president was “going to try to thread the needle of incitement without violating the rules.”
Initially, the consensus seemed to point clearly toward no violation and no “clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet[.]”
“Next, Twitter’s safety team decides that Trump’s 7:44 am ET tweet is also not in violation,” Weiss revealed. “They are unequivocal: ‘it’s a clear no vio. It’s just to say he’s not attending the inauguration[.]”
It seems clear that the general feeling at Twitter was that although most employees were not fans of the sitting president, internal communications revealed that most did not believe there was enough justification for banning him from the platform.
However, Weiss noted that to “understand Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, we must consider how Twitter deals with other heads of state and political leaders, including in Iran, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.”
She pointed out that Twitter never deleted a tweet from Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2018 calling Israel a “malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.”
Neither, Weiss pointed out, was the Ayatollah ever banned for that comment.
Incredibly, Twitter employees suggested later that Trump had violated the “Glorification of Violence policy” if they were to interpret the phrase “’American Patriots’ to refer to the rioters [on Jan. 6].”
Per Weiss, one hour after a company meeting, Twitter announced the permanent suspension of the President of the United States after reported arguments with some Twitter staff.
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