32. One hour later, Twitter announces Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

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34. And congratulatory: “big props to whoever in trust and safety is sitting there whack-a-mole-ing these trump accounts”

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35. By the next day, employees expressed eagerness to tackle “medical misinformation” as soon as possible:

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36. “For the longest time, Twitter’s stance was that we aren’t the arbiter of truth,” wrote another employee, “which I respected but never gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.”

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38. Outside the United States, Twitter’s decision to ban Trump raised alarms, including with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, and Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

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39. Macron told an audience he didn’t “want to live in a democracy where the key decisions” were made by private players. “I want it to be decided by a law voted by your representative, or by regulation, governance, democratically discussed and approved by democratic leaders.”

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40. Merkel’s spokesperson called Twitter’s decision to ban Trump from its platform “problematic” and added that the freedom of opinion is of “elementary significance.”

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny criticized the ban as “an unacceptable act of censorship.”

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41. Whether you agree with Navalny and Macron or the executives at Twitter, we hope this latest installment of #TheTwitterFiles gave you insight into that unprecedented decision.

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42. From the outset, our goal in investigating this story was to discover and document the steps leading up to the banning of Trump and to put that choice into context.

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43. Ultimately, the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company.

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44. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.

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45. This was reported by Shellen Berger MD, Isaac Grafstein, Snoozy Weiss, Olivia Reingold, Peter Savodnik, Nellie Bowles.

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The question is who should make those decisions and how.

/END

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/twitter-broke-its-own-rules-to-ban

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Every website has to make some decisions about content moderation if only to enforce laws, including the one upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Virginia v. Black (2003), against issuing threats of violence against “a particular individual or group of individuals.”

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Governments would quickly find themselves facing the same problem as Twitter in deciding who should be allowed to speak and who shouldn’t.

In retrospect, Dorsey’s vision of a single digital town square was hopelessly naive.

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COMING at 4 est:

TWITTER: THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

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1. THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six
TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

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