'Twitter Files': 5 findings on Trump ban, Michelle Obama and gov't influence
5. Trump's account ban followed immense pressure from prominent public figures and Twitter employees.
Shellenberger identified pressure from prominent public figures as one factor that led to the ban on Trump's account.
In a statement posted to Twitter on Jan. 7, 2021, former first lady Michelle Obama implored Twitter and other social media platforms to "stop enabling this monstrous behavior — and go even further than they already have already by permanently banning this man from their platforms and putting in place policies to prevent their technology from being used by this nation's leaders to fuel insurrections."
But after the events of Jan 6, the internal and external pressure on Twitter CEO @jack grows.
Former First Lady @michelleobama , tech journalist @karaswisher , @ADL , high-tech VC @ChrisSacca , and many others, publicly call on Twitter to permanently ban Trump. pic.twitter.com/RzNj7WJReg— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 10, 2022 Get Our Latest News for FREE
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A screenshot shared by Shellenberger features Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League deriding Twitter's deletion of Trump's Jan. 6 tweets as "too little, too late." Greenblatt implored Twitter to suspend Trump "until his account stops promoting disinformation and inciting violence."
Shellenberger included some context as to why he thinks Twitter executives rushed to fulfill the requests. He reshared a chart compiling statistics on the political contributions made by Twitter employees that Taibbi included in the original "Twitter Files" published on Dec. 2. Nearly all of the donations made by Twitter employees in 2022 (99.73%) went to Democrats, while just 0.27% went to Republicans.
Shellenberger also shared a screenshot of Roth maintaining that there were "ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE" two days after Trump took office. The authors of the "Twitter Files" repeatedly implied that the political affiliation of Twitter employees played a significant role in informing their efforts to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, "blacklist" the accounts of those they disagreed with, and ban Trump from the site altogether.
On Jan. 8, 2021, The Washington Post published an open letter signed by over 300 Twitter employees to Dorsey demanding Trump be banned from the platform.
As Weiss reported in Part 5, "Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump."
"But the Twitter staff assigned to evaluate tweets quickly concluded that Trump had *not* violated Twitter's policies," Weiss wrote, quoting one staffer as saying: "I think we'd have a hard time saying this is incitement."
Weiss cited examples of other world leaders who incited violence on the platform but were not banned from Twitter, including leaders in Iran, Nigeria and Ethiopia.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: [email protected]
