The third series of the Twitter Files investigation, published on Friday, December 9 evening, gave an insight into the platform’s decision to ban the personal account of Donald Trump while he was still the president of the United States.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, who wrote the first expose last week, commenced sharing the drama of Trump’s ban covering the period between October 2020 and January 6, 2021.
Trump’s account was banned from Twitter on January 8, after a close review of how his tweets were being received and interpreted on and off the micro-blogging platform, according to the company at the time.
The former president’s last tweets had included a video message urging his supporters not to break the law and peacefully depart from the US Capitol, while in the same vein, claiming that the 2020 election had not been legitimate, after which Twitter had declared the most unacceptable.
But, according to the expose, the intellectual framework for the ban was already set up in the months before the January 6 Capitol riot. An internal message reveals a Twitter executive saying that they need to look at Trump’s actions throughout the election and the last 4+ years.
Trump’s tweets criticizing mass voting by mail which the Democrats had rolled out because of the Covid-19 pandemic, were being visibly filtered as late as a week before the election.
Eventually, the moderators became very tired of censoring Trump manually that by January 6 his account was littered with bots to automate the process of slapping warning labels on his tweets.
