The latest drop of Twitter files showed how the social media company banned President Trump after the January 6th riots, while dictators were allowed to remain on the platform and promote mass violence and genocide. The Mail has the story.
While Twitter executives decided Trump’s use of the phrase ‘American patriots’ could be a “coded incitement to further violence” and banned him for it, they did nothing when the Iranian Ayatollah and the Prime Minster of Malaysia explicitly advocated slaughtering millions of lives.
The disturbing revelations came to light on Monday as journalists Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi continue to come through a trove of Twitter’s internal files and communications that Elon Musk released as a part of his mission to return the platform to a sanctuary of free speech…
Mere months before Trump was banned from Twitter, then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad took to Twitter to say Muslims had the right to murder millions of French people.
“Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past” he wrote in an October 2020 post.
The post was deleted by Twitter for “glorifying violence”, but the Prime Minister was allowed to keep his account.
And three short years prior, Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Israel a “cancerous tumor” and suggested it might be “eradicated”.
“Our stance against Israel is the same stance we have always taken.” he wrote in June 2018. “#Israel is a malignant cancerous tumour in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible it will happen.”
Despite calling for the extinction of a country’s entire population, not only was the tweet not removed, but the Ayatollah’s account remained perfectly in place.
Another Tweet Twitter allowed to remain posted was from Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who in October 2021 called his citizens to arm against people of the Tigray region in the north of the country.
The Ethiopian government has been at war with Tigray since 2020, a conflict which the Government has been accused of carrying out atrocities in.
And in February of 2021, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi threatened to arrest Twitter employees in the country and imprison them for seven years after accounts opposing him were restored.
His account, however, was untouched by the platform.
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 some considered could possibly be interpreted by some as a call to violence.
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, American First, and Make America Great Again, will have a Giant Voice long into the future,” Trump tweeted on January 8th 2021. “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
Weiss revealed that in the aftermath of that tweet, some at Twitter flagged it while others patently dismissed it as not violation any guidelines.
However, then-Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, asked whether his posts could be “coded incitement to further violence”.
Shortly after, Twitter employees decided to interpret Trump’s use of ‘American Patriots’ to refer to rioters, which they then suggested could violate Twitter’s Glorification of Violence policy.
Then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey then got involved when Twitter executives hosted a 30-minute all-staff meeting.
Finally, Trump was banned from the platform “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCullough have had their Twitter accounts reinstated. MailOnline has more.
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