Comment on this story
Comment
A former Twitter employee told a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot that the company treated former President Donald Trump more leniently because it enjoyed the “power” his stature gave the social network .
Tuesday’s testimony marked the first time a former Twitter insider has testified under oath about the company’s role in providing Trump with the megaphone he used to rally an angry mob to attack the Capitol.
Trump had 88 million followers when Twitter “permanently removed” him two days after the riot, citing concerns that he could incite further violence. But the suspension followed years of calls to ban his account over tweets that included harassment, conspiracy theories and viral lies.
The former Twitter employee said the company was considering adopting a stricter content moderation policy after Trump, during a September 2020 presidential debate, told the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys to “step back and stand aside’.
“My concern was that the former president, apparently for the first time, was speaking directly to extremist organizations and giving them instructions. We hadn’t seen that kind of direct communication before, and it bothered me,” the former employee said.
Trump’s tweet promoting Jan. 6 protest turned online planning into ‘open murder,’ panel says
But Twitter, the former official said, eventually backed off on the change, allowing Trump to continue tweeting without restrictions. Many of those tweets — including one in December in which he wrote: “Big protest in DC Jan 6th. Be there, it’s going to be wild!” — were seen by Trump supporters as calls for war, the panel said.
“Twitter reveled in the knowledge that they were also the former president’s favorite and most used service, and enjoyed having that kind of power in the social media ecosystem,” the official said. If Trump were “any other Twitter user, he would have been permanently suspended a long time ago.”
Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) said the former staffer worked on a team responsible for the platform’s moderation and content policies in 2020 and 2021. The person was not named and his voice was masked by software for voice modulation.
Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, Twitter’s vice president of public policy for the Americas, said in a statement that the company was “clear about our role in the broader information ecosystem” regarding the Jan. 6 attack, but that it “took unprecedented steps and invest significant resources to prepare for and respond to emerging threats” during the 2020 elections.
TheDonald’s owner talks about why he finally ditched the hate-filled site
The company, she said, has deployed “numerous policies and product interventions to protect the public conversation,” including designating the Proud Boys as a violent extremist group in 2018 and permanently suspending accounts associated with the group and the organizers of the siege. Capitol.
But the former employee said they had been asking Twitter managers for months “to try to show the reality that … if we don’t intervene in what I saw happening, people are going to die.”
Twitter witness: Trump spoke ‘directly’ to extremists
“And no matter how hard I tried to create one or implement it, there was nothing,” the former employee added. “We were at the whim, at the mercy of a violent mob that was locked and loaded.”
The former Twitter employee said that the night before the riots, they tried and failed to get the company to intervene by again flagging violent extremist content on the site.
“When people shoot each other tomorrow, I’ll try to rest in the knowledge that we tried,” the former Twitter employee wrote in an internal Slack message on the night of January 5, 2021. “I don’t know that Tonight I slept, to be honest. I was on pins and needles.”
The revelation inspired great anger among some technology advocates. Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, tweeted that the hearing showed that Twitter, YouTube and other social media platforms were complicit in helping Trump supporters stage the bloody uprising. Big Tech “allowed the insurgents to plan their violence,” he tweeted.
Facebook groups exceeded 10,000 daily attacks against the election before January 6, analysis shows
Insiders at the company say Twitter is just one way Trump is amplifying his rhetoric on a global stage. But Twitter was by far his best known: his Facebook account, which was also suspended after the January 6 riots, has 34 million followers. His account on Truth Social, the fledgling Twitter clone he created after his ban, has about 3 million.
Trump’s 56,571 tweets between 2009 and 2021 were often retweeted hundreds of thousands of times. Trump tweeted 600 times during his first impeachment and, after losing the 2020 election, used the platform for weeks to spread lies about how he was the victim of an international conspiracy to steal votes.
Tuesday’s hearing, which focused on how Trump helped direct far-right groups to Washington before the riots, revealed that Trump’s Dec. 19 tweet followed a “nonsensical” meeting between White House lawyers and Trump aides.
Add Comment