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So, it appears the latest (and seemingly last) set of Twitter Files has come out via Bari Weiss. Link.
This one is about what was going on inside Twitter after Jan 6th, 2021, but before the Trump ban.
It seems, as common sense entails, that employees who disliked Trump were growing more agitated over the refusal to ban him. Per Weiss, Twitter had always refused to ban him before, but the rising condemnation for Jan 6th from inside and outside was growing. People were aware that nothing he did violated the rules directly, hence one employee saying that he would "thread the needle of incitement."
In a bizarrely pro-Trump interpretation of his tweets, one staffer who was supposed to actually evaluate his tweets said that when Trump referred to "American Patriots" in a tweet, he wasn't referring to the rioters, but to people who voted for him. I have no idea why this person thought that the people who rioted weren't Trump supporters.Edit: As pointed out in the responses, I think I've misinterpreted the above. I don't think this staffer intended to separate Trump's supporters from the rioters, but it could be read that way due to the informal nature of the slack chat.
Hell, the decision of the Trust and Safety team was that no, Trump's tweets about patriots or not going to the inauguration. An official named Anika Navaroli is cited as declaring the tweets acceptable for Twitter's policies, but Weiss tries casting bad faith on her testimony to the Jan 6th committee when she said that she had been trying for months to get people to realize that if Twitter did nothing, then "people were going to die". I don't know why Weiss thinks this is a contradiction, you can believe that someone skirts the line for incitement and that particular tweets don't cross the line.
There are some points made about how Twitter never banned other heads of state for things that were far more clearly in violation of Twitter's policies and which were allowed to stay up with the speaker not banned.
Anyways, the conversation at Twitter shifted once Gadde asked if his tweets could be seen as "coded incitement to further violence". This is the line that Twitter's "scaled moderation team" (no idea what that is) then began pushing as well, with the idea that if Trump was referring to the rioters when he said "American patriots", then it would be a violation.
There's also a point where some employees apparently started referring to the Banality of Evil, with Yoel Roth explaining that was an accusation that Twitter's policy enforcers were like Nazis obeying orders.
Anyways, Twitter banned Trump. Employees in favor of this celebrated and Weiss suggests they moved on to the topic of tackling medical misinformation.
I'm not really sure how to feel about this latest (last?) reveal. The annoying thing about this is nothing is being fully made public. There are no dumps of slack chats for people to gauge how the company's employees felt about all this, just the screenshots that are deemed appropriate to be shared. We ultimately have to trust that Weiss' depiction of these people as substantially demanding Trump be banned as reflecting the consensus, but there were clearly dissenters to this policy. You even have one person saying that they disagreed with the "Twitter doesn't arbitrate truth" policy but respected it nonetheless.
A point of interest to me: the TTS team's refusal to declare Trump's tweets to be in violation of policy, with agreement from some key staffers that no coded incitement was present. That's counter to the narrative being written about the TTS team with the other Twitter Files threads.
As a former Facebook employee, I recognize some similarities in how Twitter employees have learned to buy media narratives without question.
When I first joined it was eye-opening to see the contrast in what was printed in the media and what insiders had to say. The media would say one thing, and inside you'd have someone saying, "no, I wrote the code, here's a link to the code, this story is wrong." Fellow employees would mostly thank the person and express disappointment in the media.
In the last few years this changed. You'd have people at the center of some media controversy clarifying what happened, and then their coworkers would argue back, citing articles that were clearly wrong in light of the testimony and evidence from those insiders.
For Jan 6th, a media narrative developed that Trump incited the violence. The evidence, as far as I can tell: holding a rally and telling supporters to march to the Capitol and make their voice heard. That he had said to do this peaceably was either dismissed or ignored.
At Twitter this incitement narrative appears to have been received without question.
A very small group of us at Facebook pushed back on this narrative, arguing that Trump was at most guilty of moving too slowly to call for the rioters to stop. This wasn't well received. Most of the company and 100% of everyone that mattered bought into the incitement narrative, or at least pretended to.
There were clearly people in power who didn't agree with the narrative. That they were overruled doesn't mean they don't exist.
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