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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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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.

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.

Bizarrely pro-Trump? The tweet was this:

"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!!!"

Were there 75,000,000 rioters? Did Trump actually say in this very tweet he was referring to people who voted for him?

What this release amounts to is many people inside Twitter were looking for a reason, any reason, to ban Trump, and despite some initial resistance by some more process-oriented people, he was indeed banned.

The staffer in question said the following according to 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.”

"voted for him" and "terrorists" (referring to the Jan 6th rioters) are not mutually exclusive. I'd expect that sort of interpretation from a Trump supporter looking to deny, deny, deny. When I ask myself who was there, I don't think the answer is ever going to be "people who aren't Trump supporters but decided to riot inside".

What this release amounts to is many people inside Twitter were looking for a reason, any reason, to ban Trump, and despite some initial resistance by some more process-oriented people, he was indeed banned.

We have no idea how many people wanted him banned that way. This is why I said not having the full logs to comb through makes this frustrating - we literally cannot assess accurately how many people wanted Trump gone. We can only speculate about it based on things like political donations, and we have no reason to assume the process-oriented people weren't also left-leaning or anti-Trump. The phrase "vocal minority" exists for a reason.

  • -19

I'm certain that some of the people rioting at the Capitol were part of the "75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me."

I'm not at all certain that this tweet was some dog whistle meant to praise those specific people. Trump's not known for subtlety. He'd already made a video telling the rioters he loves them.

If this is your standard, then a politician will never be able to praise their voters if some of those voters includes people who participated in a political riot. Given the summer of 2020 and the Capitol riots, that's practically everyone.

We have no idea how many people wanted him banned that way.

All of the Twitter Files stories have highlighted the little dissent they found. I can't see an incentive for misrepresenting that. What would change if instead of one person dissenting it was 10% of the company?

If this is your standard, then a politician will never be able to praise their voters if some of those voters includes people who participated in a political riot. Given the summer of 2020 and the Capitol riots, that's practically everyone.

My standard is not that you can't praise your voters, only that we shouldn't pretend your voters may include the anti-social and criminal. I would agree that those people by and large don't define any particular voter base.

  • -15

How would you change the tweet without spoiling its positive message?

I don't think it should be changed. I think it's clear he's talking about his voters overall, not a specific sub-group. But I wouldn't say that his tweet doesn't include those people.

But then it wasn’t bizarre. The whole point was people arguing that tweet was secretly trying to encourage more rioters when you are effectively saying no — that isn’t a reasonable interpretation.

The interpretation of by that employee was bizarre in that it tried to separate the rioters from Trump supporters. All I'm saying is that this isn't very reasonable - you probably don't have many non-Trump supporters rioting inside the building. This can be true even if we say that the modal supporter isn't a rioter.

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