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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.
This is particularly hilarious combined with the "misinformation" angle where Twitter literally arbitrates truth. But I guess no censorship is ever enough.
It looks like everybody has their own level of tolerance there. For some it's OK to have super strict rules as long as they are consistently applied, for some it's ok to follow "to friends, everything, to enemies - the law" and apply rules in some cases while ignoring them in others, to some it's ok if you can find the rule to ban, no matter how tenuous the connection, but the rule must be found - and to some the ban has to happen no matter what, and if the rules are not enough, just invent the new ones and ignore them. Maybe it helps the censors to feel they're good guys after all.
As for the narrative, I am not sure it is countered that much. Surely, there were discussions about how to ban a particular deplorable account, and whether a particular deplorable tweet can be matched to a particular rule. That doesn't mean the team didn't have common goal of suppressing certain kind of speech. I mean, it is known that Trotsky and Stalin became bitter enemies at the end, and no doubt argued a lot before that, but that doesn't mean they weren't both communists and didn't have the common goal of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and build the Communist society everywhere. If some of the Twitter team disagreed about whether a particular tweet should be suppressed in a particular manner, that does not exactly disprove the narrative of the existence of the system of suppression based on politics and point of view. It just gives us an insight on its inner workings.
Keep in mind that this was pre-COVID. Most of Twitter’s biggest “well, ackshuallys” hadn’t yet become so salient.
The existence of disagreement is important, even if it was ineffective. Frankly, all these threads are a blur, but I got the impression other releases wanted to paint TTS as leading the charge. The bailey is something like “Twitter was so captured you couldn’t even find rules-lawyers,” and this helps to argue against that particular form.
I thought most of this stuff was from October 2020 to January 2021; Twitter had begun well-ackshuallying in May 2020.
I suppose you’re right. I had the year wrong.
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