Twitter files show how Trump was banned, while world dictators were allowed to call for mass murder
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The latest archival post from Twitter showed how the social media company banned President Trump after the January 6 riots, while dictators were allowed to stay on the platform and promote mass violence and genocide.
While Twitter executives decided that Trump’s use of the phrase “American patriots” could be “coded incitement to more violence” and banned him for it, they did nothing when the Iranian ayatollah and the Malaysian prime minister explicitly advocated for killing millions of lives.
The disturbing revelations came to light Monday as journalists Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi continued to sift through a trove of files and internal Twitter communications that Elon Musk posted as part of his mission to turn the platform into a sanctuary for free speech.
It was previously revealed that Twitter actively suppressed the accounts of far-right commenters like Charlie Kirk, Dan Bongino, and many others, marking them “do not amplify” during the pandemic.
The latest Twitter archives show that President Donald Trump was banned from the platform for tweets that some thought could be interpreted as calls for violence.
While Trump was banned, Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (left) and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad (right) were allowed to remain on the platform despite explicit calls for genocide.
Months before Trump was banned from Twitter, then Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad took to Twitter to say that Muslims had the right to murder millions of French people.
“Muslims have the right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past,” he wrote in an October 2021 post.
The post was removed by Twitter for ‘glorifying violence’, but the prime minister was allowed to keep his account.
And three short years earlier, Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Israel a “cancerous tumor” and suggested that it could be “eradicated.”
“Our stance against Israel is the same as we have always taken,” he wrote in June 2018. “#Israel is a malignant cancerous growth in the West Asia region that must be excised and eradicated: it may happen.”
Despite calling for the extinction of the entire population of a country, not only was the tweet not removed, but the ayatollah’s account remained perfectly in place.
Another tweet that Twitter allowed to remain published was that of the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, who in October 2021 called on his citizens to arm themselves against the people of the Tigray region in the north of the country.
The Ethiopian government has been at war with Tigray since 2020, a conflict in which the government has been accused of committing atrocities.
And in February 2021, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi threatened to arrest Twitter employees in the country and jail them for seven years after accounts that opposed him were restored.
His account, however, was not touched by the platform.
About an hour and a half after Twitter staff determined that Trump’s tweets did not violate Twitter policy, then-Head of Legal, Policy and Trust Vijaya Gadde suggested that his posts could be “coded incitement to more violence.”
While those world leaders explicitly called for violence on Twitter but were allowed to remain on the platform almost unchecked, executives made the decision to ban Trump for a tweet that some felt could be interpreted by some as a call for violence. .
“The 75,000,000 of the great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICAN FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE in the future,” Trump tweeted on January 8, 2021. “They will not be disrespected or will treat them unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!’
Weiss revealed that after that tweet, some on Twitter flagged it, while others clearly dismissed it as not violating any guidelines.
However, the then head of Legal, Policy and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, asked if his posts could be a “coded incitement to more violence”.
Soon after, Twitter employees decided to interpret Trump’s use of “American Patriots” to refer to rioters, which they later suggested might violate Twitter’s policy of glorifying violence.
Then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey got involved when Twitter executives hosted a 30-minute all-staff meeting.
Ultimately, Trump was banned from the platform “due to the risk of further incitement to violence.”
On the heels of the deadly Capitol riot on January 6, Jack Dorsey (left) was vacationing in French Polynesia and delegated much of the decision-making to Yoel Roth, then head of security and trust, who navigated the process to ban trump.
The documents released Friday mainly related to the months leading up to the January 8, 2021 decision to ban Donald Trump from Twitter. Trump is seen on January 6 before the riot at the Capitol
The latest Twitter files build on the previous batch, where it was revealed that former Twitter security chief Yoel Roth was pressured by federal authorities to suppress the First Amendment rights of conservative commenters who pushed the fraud idea. during the 2020 presidential election.
Leaks by journalist Matt Taibbi also show that employees of the tech giant openly discussed the banning of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee over a joke.
Taibbi tweeted a screenshot of a message between Twitter executives following an FBI report highlighting tweets from former public servant and Tippecanoe County, Indiana Republican John Basham.
Basham alleged that between two and 25 percent of mail-in ballots were rejected due to “mistakes.”
He later tweeted, “An unexpected number of registered Republicans are returning ballots,” while alleging that voting by mail had been a scheme by the Democratic Party to gain an election advantage.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s joke about voting for his dead grandparents in 2020 was also flagged by Twitter staffers.
One exchange (left) shows Roth explaining that he will miss “the FBI and DHS meetings.” Roth is also seen joking (right) about a mysterious meeting on his calendar, saying that “this is DEFINITELY not an FBI meeting, I SWEAR.”
Instead of deleting the tweet, Roth opted to put the label “Learn how voting is safe and secure” on the message.
Roth, who resigned from Twitter last month following Musk’s inauguration, did not immediately respond to a DailyMail.com request for comment on Saturday.
Basham responded to the leak on Twitter saying: ‘Twitter files show the FBI violated my First Amendment right by making Twitter take action against my tweets!
“The federal government has no right to determine what I can publish or what I can say.”
Musk defended the FBI in a tweet that said: “With rare exceptions, the FBI seems to want to do the right thing.”
He admitted that under the former Twitter leaders, the company “operated as an activist machine for the Democratic Party.”
Twitter staff argued that “historical context” and “current climate” should factor into the decision to suspend Trump’s account ahead of his January 8, 2021 ban.
The previous Twitter thread also covered the months and weeks leading up to then-President Donald Trump’s Twitter ban following the riots on Capitol Hill, shedding light on increasingly frantic internal efforts within the social media site to moderate his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
Some of the most intriguing documents relate to the apparent intimate relationship between Twitter’s top executives and the FBI, though Taibbi did not reveal any direct evidence of the agency’s involvement in the decision to veto Trump.
In an undated chat on the messaging app Slack that Taibbi says took place after the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, Roth is seen joking about a mystery meeting on his calendar, saying that “I DEFINITELY not It’s a meeting with the FBI, I SWEAR.”
A separate message mentions ‘an FBI report on 2 tweets’, which appeared to be related to claims about voter fraud in the November 2020 election.
The message notes that one of the tweets, which claimed that mail-in ballots were being “shredded,” was deemed false, but that the second, which claimed that up to 25 percent of mail-in ballots were being “rejected by errors’ turned out to be within Twitter policy.