TWITTER FILES PAINTS A DAMNING PICTURE OF TWITTER’S MAOIST CULTURE
Bari Weiss has just published the fifth installment in Elon Musk’s exposé about the rampant corruption in Twitter. This matters because Twitter is no ordinary company.
Even more than Facebook or other social media sites, it was the dominant platform for political speech in America—and Twitter employees were Maoists waging a cultural revolution against President Trump and anyone who voted for him. I’ll load Weiss’s tweets below, but here’s the quick summary:
On January 8, Trump loaded two tweets, one saying that the 75,000,000 Americans who voted for him would be heard and the other saying that he would not attend Biden’s “inauguration” (or, as I always think of it, his “installation”). Those Twitter employees in charge of analyzing tweets concluded that Trump’s tweets had not violated any policy.
The zealots on Twitter’s bloated payroll (most of whom had graduated from America’s hard-left colleges), however, were having none of that. They were adamant that Trump had violated the policy against incitement. As one employee stated in the company’s Slack channel, it was “pretty obvious he’s going to try to thread the needle of incitement without violating the rules.”
In other words, these proud products of America’s academic system firmly believed that they had to violate their own rules in order to prevent Trump from continuing not to violate their rules.
Weiss has chapter and verse showing the Maoist employees demanding that the President of the United States be kicked off America’s premier political platform, even as those given the task of analyzing his tweets could not twist them into anything approaching conduct that violated Twitter’s rules.
Weiss, to her credit, makes the point that, even as Twitter was twisting itself into intellectually corrupt pretzels to silence an American president, it was an open platform for world leaders engaged in genuine incitement.
Those who remained on the platform were Iran’s Ayatollah demanding Israel’s annihilation, a Malayan Prime Minister calling for Muslims to “kill millions of French people,” the Nigerian leader inciting violence against pro-Biafra groups, the Ethiopian Prime Minister calling on citizens to take up arms against a region within Ethiopia, and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s threat to imprison Twitter employees for restoring accounts he disliked.
Twitter deleted their inciting tweets but did not deplatform them.
And of course, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s Trump-hating top attorney, tried to twist Trump’s word into “coded incitement to further violence.” In other words, if Trump says it, it must be an incitement to violence because his 75,000,000 supporters are all waiting to rise up.
This mindset appears in a Slack conversation referring to an idea from the “scaled enforcement team”: “SCALE is asking if we would consider Trump’s Tweet for GOV. If we consider ‘American Patriots’ to refer to the rioters, they have a point.”
Somehow, neither Gadde, SCALE, or other Twitter employees had concerns during Occupy Wall Street, the Ferguson Riots, or any of the violence that ensued following George Floyd’s death from the combined effects of multiple illegal drugs in his system.
The effort, always, was to silence Trump. Any voices to the contrary—voices that pointed to Twitter’s own policies and previous patterns and practices, were silenced.
The reason behind this madness was the SCALE team had lost all perspective, coming to “view him [Trump] 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.”
The rest of the Twitter staff was the same. During a 30-minute all-staff meeting that Jack Dorsey and Gadde chaired, employees became increasingly hysterical.
Yoel Roth (the link is to his disgusting Tweets), Twitter’s chief censor and the man with a predilection for porn and an unpleasant obsession with children, brushed off the few voices concerned that Twitter’s employees were themselves mindless Nazis. When Dorsey appeared to want a clear statement about what was going on, Roth even wrote “god [sic] help us [this] makes me think he wants to share it publicly.”
After Twitter banned Trump, the staff members that had pushed for the ban were ecstatic. They were now ready to move on to banning all COVID content that ran counter to Fauci, the CDC, and the incoming Biden administration. Wiser heads were worried, but they did not prevail.
I urge you to read Weiss’s entire Twitter thread, which paints a damning picture of an increasingly Maoist culture among the hysterical (and, as it turns out, mostly useless) Twitter staff.
These are the same caliber of employees whom we’ve seen bullying Netflix, Disney, and other woke companies—although it’s important to note that, often, companies yield to these employees because their own management must answer to BlackRock and Vanguard, both of which have hard-left managements and impose those values on the companies in their portfolios.
- On the morning of January 8, President Donald Trump, with one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension from Twitter, tweets twice.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- 7:44 am: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” pic.twitter.com/bRF7O4Ijcf
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- “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.”https://t.co/rtQjkQQxSs
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- There were dissenters inside Twitter.
“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee on January 7, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.” pic.twitter.com/LtonK0gfS3
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- After January 6, Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump. “There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,” said one Twitter employee. pic.twitter.com/x9Xty6ndYP
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- In the early afternoon of January 8, The Washington Post published an open letter signed by over 300 Twitter employees to CEO Jack Dorsey demanding Trump’s ban. “We must examine Twitter’s complicity in what President-Elect Biden has rightly termed insurrection.”
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- “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.”
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- “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.” pic.twitter.com/DnJk2UUuf6
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- (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.”)
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- 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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- In October 2020, the former Malaysian Prime Minister said it was “a right” for Muslims to “kill millions of French people.”
Twitter deleted his tweet for “glorifying violence,” but he remains on the platform. The tweet below was taken from the Wayback Machine: pic.twitter.com/7tgxgCw9I9
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- In October 2021, 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. pic.twitter.com/DThmGsJM1r
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- But Twitter executives did ban Trump, even though key staffers said that Trump had not incited violence—not even in a “coded” way.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- A few minutes later, Twitter employees on the “scaled enforcement team” suggest 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. pic.twitter.com/Wszq4zBqnW
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- Two hours later, Twitter executives host a 30-minute 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.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- Dorsey requested simpler language to explain Trump’s suspension.
Roth wrote, “god help us [this] makes me think he wants to share it publicly” pic.twitter.com/KTMumR0rDD
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- Many at Twitter were ecstatic. pic.twitter.com/wgxuwQBLkU
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- By the next day, employees expressed eagerness to tackle “medical misinformation” as soon as possible: pic.twitter.com/kJKqZaSekt
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- But Twitter’s COO Parag Agrawal—who would later succeed Dorsey as CEO—told Head of Security Mudge Zatko: “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.” pic.twitter.com/8f5bSXRKk5
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- 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.”
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- Whether you agree with Navalny and Macron or the executives at Twitter, we hope this latest installment of #TheTwitterFiles gave you insight into that unprecedented decision.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- Ultimately, the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
- This was reported by @ShellenbergerMD, @IsaacGrafstein, @SnoozyWeiss, @Olivia_Reingold, @petersavodnik, @NellieBowles. Follow all of our work at The Free Press: @TheFP
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
Andrea Widburg is deputy editor of American Thinker