When former President Trump was de-platformed from Twitter between January 6 and January 8, 2022, the third installment of Elon Musk’s Twitter Files series detailed what happened behind the scenes. According to Twitter Files 3.0, the Safety Operations division of Twitter had a “Supreme Court of Moderation” with fewer but more powerful officials. In situations involving the president (Donald Trump), they allegedly made content judgments on the fly, frequently in minutes and based on assumptions, gut instincts, and even Google searches.
The internal flagging or even Donald Trump’s factually accurate tweets by Twitter’s Supreme Court of Moderation was highlighted by Substack writer Matt Taibbi as an example of the imprecise “gut decisions” that Twitter made.
“Whatever your thoughts on the choice to fire Trump that day, there is little doubt that the internal Twitter exchanges from January 6 through January 8 are significant historically,” Tabibi said.
She added that even Twitter staff acknowledged that it was a significant turning point in the history of speech.
Did twitter ignore Biden?
The talks around pro-Joe Biden tweets that suggested Trump “may try to steal the election” often occurred, according to Matt Taibbi. Twitter management was aware of these tweets but they weren’t marked as spam. In contrast, pro-Donald Trump tweets that made similar claims about the theft of elections were often reported and removed, even to the point where associated Twitter accounts were suspended.
De-amplification tools were rolled back after initial approval, according to Trump’s election tweets.
According to papers, Twitter launched a new “de-amplification” tool in December 2020 after Trump lost the presidential election and would use it to identify the president’s allegations that the election had been rigged.
President Trump tweeted on December 10 that some executives wanted to utilize the new de-amplification function to secretly restrict Trump’s reach further right now, according to Taibbi. However, until the “L3 entities” became live the next morning, the team was forced to employ older, less aggressive labeling technologies, at least for that day.
Elon Musk, the company’s new owner, has made a point of being transparent about Twitter’s past and present content curation practices, including its use of prohibited content. Earlier this week, Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, posed a question to Elon Musk: If Twitter’s current mission is “transparency to build trust,” why don’t they just release everything without censorship and let people make their judgments? This would include all discussions about the present and potential future actions. Things sure heated up soon as the news started making rounds that trump was returning to Twitter but this development could sure add some juice to everything in the next couple of days.
