Twitter Execs Were Looking for Any Excuse to Ban Trump

Twitter Execs Were Looking for Any Excuse to Ban Trump

December 12, 2022

Elon Musk’s Twitter released another batch of internal discussions on Friday night, which revealed that executives at the social media giant established a “framework” for banning former President Trump’s account before the events of January 6, and used the Capitol chaos as their excuse to finally blacklist him.

The documents posted to Twitter by journalist Matt Taibbi is the first release of documents pertaining to President Trump’s account ban in January 2021. In a lengthy Twitter thread, Taibbi explained that the internal communications at Twitter between January 6 and January 8 2021 suggest that even the employees of the social media company understood the move to censor a sitting U.S. president would have a historical impact.

“Is this the first sitting head of state to ever be suspended?” one Twitter user asked in internal communications.

After banning Trump, Twitter executives appeared to relish their newfound power, and even flirted with banning future the official @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts, but ultimately decided the accounts “will be transitioned over to the new administration in due course and will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.”

With regards to their reasons for banning Trump’s account, one Twitter executive said in an internal chat: “the narrative that Trump and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and frankly the last 4+ years must be taken into account.”

In addition to these revelations, Taibbi also published damning internal documents pertaining to Twitter execs “getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies” like the FBI during the 2020 presidential election.

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