Monday’s sixth edition of the explosive “Twitter Files” showed that employees of the social media behemoth campaigned for former President Donald Trump to be permanently banned from the network.
Trump was banned from Twitter on January 8, 2021, two days after his supporters invaded the Capitol and disrupted Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory certification.
According to writer Bari Weiss, Trump sent out two tweets on the morning of the eighth, including one praising the almost 75 million Americans who voted for him in the election and declaring, “They will in no way be insulted or treated unfairly!!!”
Trump revealed in a second tweet that he will not attend Biden’s inauguration on January 20.
According to Weiss, the initial post prompted an outcry among Twitter’s staff, with one employee commenting, “We must do the right thing and remove this account.”
“Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary leadership,” commented another, while a third added, “it’s quite evident he’ll attempt to provoke without breaking the rules.”
Trump’s account was reinstated by new CEO Elon Musk one month ago, but he has yet to tweet from it, instead continuing to publish his ideas on his Truth Social platform.
Weiss, a former Wall Street Journal and New York Times editor and writer who now runs a Substack site called The Free Press, is one of three independent journalists granted access to Twitter’s internal messaging.
Michael Shellenberger detailed on Saturday how Twitter employees lobbied for policy changes to bar Trump following the unrest, which was blamed for five deaths.
Since December 2, when journalist Matt Taibbi revealed how the company suppressed The Post’s bombshell report on Hunter Biden’s foreign business interests, as evidenced by documents found on the first son’s abandoned laptop, details of Twitter’s actions and policies under the pre-Musk regime have been made public on occasion.
The second installment, published by Weiss on December 8, described how the social media giant “blacklisted” conservative accounts and people. The next day, however, Taibbi discovered that the site went out of its way to justify putting up posts from pro-Biden users.
Twitter was in communication with the FBI and other federal agencies regarding so-called “misinformation” spread on the site, according to the third tranche of the documents.
»Fifth ‘Twitter files’ part describes Trump’s final hours on the platform«