Twitter Files 5: To prove Trump got a raw deal, Weiss clubs Modi with a bunch of despots

In the fifth episode of Twitter Files, journalist Bari Weiss gives an example of Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, alleging he had threatened to jail employees of the social media company and yet his account was not suspended while the then-President of the US Donald Trump got no more than two chances to ‘fall in line’ and was then removed. “In early February 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government threatened to arrest Twitter employees in India, and to incarcerate them for up to seven years after they restored hundreds of accounts that had been critical of him.

“Twitter did not ban Modi,” Weiss, who is one of the two journalists and representatives of the new Twitter boss, Elon Musk, whom the old Twitter management is handing over their classified documents, affirmed in the 24^th tweet of her thread.

Many Indian users of Twitter asked Weiss to prove Prime Minister Modi had indeed said what she was attributing to him, but she did not respond.

Last year, the Government of India had told social media companies that while they operated in this country, they had to abide by the Indian law and, in the case of disputes, a “grievance officer” that they were supposed to appoint would try to address the issue. Twitter created the maximum fuss in compliance while other social networking sites gradually conformed.

The closest that Weiss got to the truth in this regard is the news dated 2019 (not 2021, unlike what she claims) and it was a statement from the union government and not a speech or write-up by Prime Minister Modi. The government had warned Twitter that its top executives could face up to 7 years in jail along with financial penalties for their failure to remove content and accounts carrying “objectionable and inflammatory content” on 13 March 2019.

This response from the government was a reaction to incessant complaints from its supporters that Twitter was suspending and removing their accounts merely for not being leftist in their ideological persuasion.

This episode of the Twitter scandal of biased censorship entails several examples of heads of governments doing or saying things that a neutral, third-party intermediary ideally need not obey but the said company did. Weiss begins with the time when then-US President Trump was removed. “On the morning of January 8, President Donald Trump, with one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension from Twitter, tweets twice,” Weiss tweeted.

At 6:46 AM, Trump had tweeted that day, recalled Weiss: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

At 7:44 AM, Trump wrote: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th,” Weiss recollected.

“For years,” Weiss wrote, “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.”

“Our mission is to provide a forum that enables people to be informed and to engage their leaders directly,” the company wrote in 2019. Twitter’s aim was to “protect the public’s right to hear from their leaders and to hold them to account,” Weiss cited from the company’s policy of the time.

But post-6 January 2021, Weiss tweeted, internal and external pressure to remove Trump grew — as claimed earlier by the other journalist who is receiving the Twitter Files on Elon Musk’s behalf, Matt Taibbi, and their collaborator Michael Shellenberger, the author of Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko.

Not everybody in the company was ready to bow, Weiss said, quoting an employee who had written in the office correspondence,

“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,” Weiss wrote. Slack channels are forums that Twitter employees use for intra-office correspondence.

Recall: Twitter Files 4: How Dorsey’s executives prepared justification for banning Donald Trump

Then, after 6 January, “Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump. ‘There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,’ said one Twitter employee,” Weiss cited from another Slack channel.

“We have to do the right thing and ban this account,” Weiss cited a staff member as saying. It’s “pretty obvious he’s going to try to thread the needle of incitement without violating the rules,” she claimed another said, posting the following screenshot:

In the early afternoon of 8 January , “The Washington Post published an open letter signed by over 300 Twitter employees to CEO Jack Dorsey demanding Trump’s ban,” Weiss wrote, citing, “We must examine Twitter’s complicity in what President-Elect Biden has rightly termed insurrection.”

“But the Twitter staff assigned to evaluate tweets quickly concluded that Trump had not violated Twitter’s policies. “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote one staff member, as per Weiss.

“It’s pretty clear he’s saying the ‘American Patriots’ are the ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that, right?) from Wednesday,” the staff member wrote, claimed Weiss. A colleague reportedly agreed. “Don’t see the incitement angle here.” [the exact quote would be “incitement of fear”, as seen in the screenshot below]

“I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet,” wrote Anika Navaroli, a Twitter policy official. “I’ll respond in the elections channel and say that our team has assessed and found no vios”—or violations—“for the DJT one,” Weiss recalled.

“She does just that,” Weiss said, citing the official further, “as an fyi, Safety has assessed the DJT Tweet above and determined that there is no violation of our policies at this time.”

Weiss posted a qualifier in parentheses after the above, saying, “Later, Navaroli would testify to the House Jan. 6 committee: ‘For months I had been begging and anticipating and attempting to raise the reality that if nothing—if we made no intervention into what I saw occuring, people were going to die.’”

Thereafter, “Twitter’s safety team decides that Trump’s 7:44 am ET tweet is also not in violation. They are unequivocal: ‘it’s a clear no vio. It’s just to say he’s not attending the inauguration’,” Weiss quoted.

Twitter’s safety team decides that Trump’s 7:44 am ET tweet is also not in violation. They are unequivocal: “it’s a clear no vio. It’s just to say he’s not attending the inauguration,” Weiss tweeted.

Then Weiss began comparing the treatment meted out to the former US president with how other heads of states were treated. “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 wrote.

“In June 2018,” Weiss recalled, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had tweeted, “#Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.”

“Twitter neither deleted the tweet nor banned the Ayatollah,” she pointed out with the following screenshot:

In October 2020, the former Malaysian Prime Minister said it was “a right” for Muslims to “kill millions of French people”, Weiss quoted Mahathir Mohamad as saying. She wrote then that Twitter deleted the Malaysian prime minister’s tweet for “glorifying violence,” but he remains on the platform. The tweet below was taken from the Wayback Machine:

“Muhammadu Buhari, the President of Nigeria, incited violence against pro-Biafra groups,” Weiss recalled, citing, “Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war will treat them in the language they understand.”

Twitter deleted the tweet but did not ban Buhari, Weiss pointed out. She shared no screenshot or link to substantiate this claim.

“In October 2021,” Weiss then tweeted, “Twitter allowed Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to call on citizens to take up arms against the Tigray region. Twitter allowed the tweet to remain up, and did not ban the prime minister.”

It is after this that Weiss mentions Prime Minister Modi, clubbing him with the bunch above of autocrats, theocrats and bigoted heads of governments. She shared

“But Twitter executives did ban Trump,” Weiss continued, “even though key staffers said that Trump had not incited violence—not even in a ‘coded’ way.”

Less than 90 min after Twitter employees had determined that Trump’s tweets were not in violation of Twitter policy, Weiss wrote, Vijaya Gadde—Twitter’s Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust—asked whether it could, in fact, be “coded incitement to further violence.”

Weiss said that a few minutes later, “Twitter employees on the ‘scaled enforcement team'” suggested that Trump’s tweet “may have violated Twitter’s Glorification of Violence policy—if you interpreted the phrase ‘American Patriots’ to refer to the rioters.”

“Things escalate from there,” Weiss said, claiming that members of that team came to “view him as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.”

Two hours later, Weiss claimed, Twitter executives hosted a 30 min all-staff meeting. “Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde answer staff questions as to why Trump wasn’t banned yet. But they make some employees angrier,” the journalist tweeted.

Then comes a shocking admission by the now-infamous operative of the old Twitter management, Yoel Roth. He says and Weiss quotes: “Multiple tweeps [Twitter employees] have quoted the Banality of Evil suggesting that people implementing our policies are like Nazis following orders.”

Dorsey requested simpler language to explain Trump’s suspension. Roth wrote, “god help us [this] makes me think he wants to share it publicly,” Weiss narrated.

An hour later that day last year, Twitter announced Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”, Weiss recalled.

This led to a jubilation in Twitter ranks.

There were congratulatory messages also, as Weiss cited: “big props to whoever in trust and safety is sitting there whack-a-mole-ing these trump accounts.”

By the next day, employees expressed eagerness to tackle “medical misinformation” as soon as possible, Weiss cited:

Weiss recalled Twitter’s stated policy again in the words of an employee: “For the longest time, Twitter’s stance was that we aren’t the arbiter of truth,” wrote another employee, “which I respected but never gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.”

But Twitter’s COO Parag Agrawal—who would later succeed Dorsey as CEO—told Head of Security Mudge Zatko, Weiss cited: “I think a few of us should brainstorm the ripple effects” of Trump’s ban. Agrawal added: “centralized content moderation IMO has reached a breaking point now.”

Outside the United States, Weiss wrote, Twitter’s decision to ban Trump raised alarms, including with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, and Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Macron told an audience he didn’t “want to live in a democracy where the key decisions” were made by private players. “I want it to be decided by a law voted by your representative, or by regulation, governance, democratically discussed and approved by democratic leaders,” Weiss tweeted, as though she shared the sentiment, which was not seen when she attributed a statement to Prime Minister Modi that he had never stated.

Merkel’s spokesperson called Twitter’s decision to ban Trump from its platform “problematic” and added that the freedom of opinion is of “elementary significance”, Weiss cited, adding in the same tweet that Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny had criticised the ban as “an unacceptable act of censorship.”

Weiss claimed this episode of Twitter Files “gave you insight into that unprecedented decision”, whether or not anybody shared the view of Macron and Navalny.

She concluded the story with the following tweets: