57. The firm’s executives on day 1 of the January 6th crisis at least tried to pay lip service to its dizzying array of rules. By day 2, they began wavering. By day 3, a million rules were reduced to one: what we say, goes

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57. This “Freedom or Death” tweet from #StopTheSteal gadfly Mike Coudrey elicits heated reactions:

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58. Roth groans about Coudrey: “THIS asshole,” but still seems determined to stick at least superficially to rules, itching to act “if” this “constitutes incitement.”

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59. At 2:39 p.m. PST, a comms official asked Roth to confirm or deny a story that they’d restricted Trump’s ability to tweet. Roth says, “We have not.”

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60. Minutes later, Roth executed the historic act of “bouncing” Trump, i.e. putting him in timeout. “I hope you… are appropriately CorpSec’d,” says a colleague.

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This theme of Policy perhaps being stressed by queries from Communications executives – who themselves have to answer the public’s questions – occasionally appears. Two days later, you see chatter about pulling Comms out of the loop:

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61. The first company-wide email from Gadde on January 6th announced that 3 Trump tweets had been bounced, but more importantly signaled a determination to use legit “violations” as a guide for any possible permanent suspension:

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63. A few last notes about January 6th. Roth at one point looked and found Trump had a slew of duplicate bot applications:

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64. By the end of the first day, the top execs are still trying to apply rules. By the next day, they will contemplate a major change in approach. Watch Shellen BergerMD this weekend for the play-by-play of how all that went down.

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65. By January 8th, which we will describe Sunday, Twitter will be receiving plaudits from “our partners” in Washington, and the sitting U.S. president will no longer be heard on the platform.

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66. Lastly, people on the left, right, and in between want to know what else is in the #TwitterFiles, from suppression/shadow-banning of leftists to lab-leak theorists, or amplification of military propaganda or conservative accounts. We know everyone has questions.

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67. And while we’ve stumbled on tidbits here and there about topics ranging from COVID to foreign policy, the reality is the data sets are enormous and we’re still working through them.

More is coming. Good night, all.

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1. TWITTER FILES, PART 4

The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7

As the pressure builds, Twitter executives build the case for a permanent ban

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On Jan 7, senior Twitter execs:

- create justifications to ban Trump

- seek a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders

- express no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban

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For those catching up, please see:

Part 1, where documents show how senior Twitter executives violated their own policies to prevent the spread of accurate information about Hunter Biden’s laptop;

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Part 2, how senior Twitter execs created secret blacklists to “de-amplify” disfavored Twitter users, not just specific tweets;

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And Part 3, where we show how senior Twitter execs censored tweets by Trump in the run-up to the Nov 2020 election while regularly engaging with representatives of U.S. government law enforcement agencies.

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For years, Twitter had resisted calls to ban Trump.

“Blocking a world leader from Twitter,” it wrote in 2018, “would hide important info... [and] hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”

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