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Dec 10, 2022 42 tweets 55 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham 32. This inspires a long Slack that reads like an @TitaniaMcGrath parody. “I agree it’s a joke,” concedes a Twitter employee, “but he’s also literally admitting in a tweet a crime.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath The group declares Huck’s an “edge case,” and though one notes, “we don’t make exceptions for jokes or satire,” they ultimately decide to leave him be, because “we’ve poked enough bears.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 33. "Could still mislead people... could still mislead people," the humor-averse group declares, before moving on from Huckabee
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 33. Roth suggests moderation even in this absurd case could depend on whether or not the joke results in “confusion.” This seemingly silly case actually foreshadows serious later issues:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 34. In the docs, execs often expand criteria to subjective issues like intent (yes, a video is authentic, but why was it shown?), orientation (was a banned tweet shown to condemn, or support?), or reception (did a joke cause “confusion”?). This reflex will become key in J6.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 35. In another example, Twitter employees prepare to slap a “mail-in voting is safe” warning label on a Trump tweet about a postal screwup in Ohio, before realizing “the events took place,” which meant the tweet was “factually accurate”:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 36. “VERY WELL DONE ON SPEED” Trump was being “visibility filtered” as late as a week before the election. Here, senior execs didn’t appear to have a particular violation, but still worked fast to make sure a fairly anodyne Trump tweet couldn’t be “replied to, shared, or liked”:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath "VERY WELL DONE ON SPEED": the group is pleased the Trump tweet is dealt with quickly
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 37. A seemingly innocuous follow-up involved a tweet from actor @realJamesWoods, whose ubiquitous presence in argued-over Twitter data sets is already a #TwitterFiles in-joke.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 38. After Woods angrily quote-tweeted about Trump’s warning label, Twitter staff – in a preview of what ended up happening after J6 – despaired of a reason for action, but resolved to “hit him hard on future vio.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 39. Here a label is applied to Georgia Republican congresswoman Jody Hice for saying, “Say NO to big tech censorship!” and, “Mailed ballots are more prone to fraud than in-person balloting… It’s just common sense.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 40. Twitter teams went easy on Hice, only applying “soft intervention,” with Roth worrying about a “wah wah censorship” optics backlash:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 41. Meanwhile, there are multiple instances of involving pro-Biden tweets warning Trump “may try to steal the election” that got surfaced, only to be approved by senior executives. This one, they decide, just “expresses concern that mailed ballots might not make it on time.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 42. “THAT’S UNDERSTANDABLE”: Even the hashtag #StealOurVotes – referencing a theory that a combo of Amy Coney Barrett and Trump will steal the election – is approved by Twitter brass, because it’s “understandable” and a “reference to… a US Supreme Court decision.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 43. In this exchange, again unintentionally humorous, former Attorney General Eric Holder claimed the U.S. Postal Service was “deliberately crippled,”ostensibly by the Trump administration. He was initially hit with a generic warning label, but it was quickly taken off by Roth:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 44. Later in November 2020, Roth asked if staff had a “debunk moment” on the “SCYTL/Smartmantic vote-counting” stories, which his DHS contacts told him were a combination of “about 47” conspiracy theories:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 45. On December 10th, as Trump was in the middle of firing off 25 tweets saying things like, “A coup is taking place in front of our eyes,” Twitter executives announced a new “L3 deamplification” tool. This step meant a warning label now could also come with deamplification:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 46. Some executives wanted to use the new deamplification tool to silently limit Trump’s reach more right away, beginning with the following tweet:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 47. However, in the end, the team had to use older, less aggressive labeling tools at least for that day, until the “L3 entities” went live the following morning.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 48. The significance is that it shows that Twitter, in 2020 at least, was deploying a vast range of visible and invisible tools to rein in Trump’s engagement, long before J6. The ban will come after other avenues are exhausted
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 49. In Twitter docs execs frequently refer to “bots,” e.g. “let’s put a bot on that.” A bot is just any automated heuristic moderation rule. It can be anything: every time a person in Brazil uses “green” and “blob” in the same sentence, action might be taken.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 50. In this instance, it appears moderators added a bot for a Trump claim made on Breitbart. The bot ends up becoming an automated tool invisibly watching both Trump and, apparently, Breitbart (“will add media ID to bot”). Trump by J6 was quickly covered in bots.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 51. There is no way to follow the frenzied exchanges among Twitter personnel from between January 6thand 8th without knowing the basics of the company’s vast lexicon of acronyms and Orwellian unwords.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 52. To “bounce” an account is to put it in timeout, usually for a 12-hour review/cool-off:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 53. “Interstitial,” one of many nouns used as a verb in Twitterspeak (“denylist” is another), means placing a physical label atop a tweet, so it can’t be seen.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 54. PII has multiple meanings, one being “Public Interest Interstitial,” i.e. a covering label applied for “public interest” reasons. The post below also references “proactive V,” i.e. proactive visibility filtering.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 55. This is all necessary background to J6. Before the riots, the company was engaged in an inherently insane/impossible project, trying to create an ever-expanding, ostensibly rational set of rules to regulate every conceivable speech situation that might arise between humans.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods This project was preposterous yet its leaders were unable to see this, having become infected with groupthing, coming to believe – sincerely – that it was Twitter's responsibility to control, as much as possible, what people could talk about, how often, and with whom.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 57. The firm’s executives on day 1 of the January 6th crisis at least tried to pay lip service to its dizzying array of rules. By day 2, they began wavering. By day 3, a million rules were reduced to one: what we say, goes
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 56. When panic first breaks out on J6 there’s a fair share of WTF-type posts, mixed in with frantic calls for Twitter to start deploying its full arsenal of moderation tools. “What is the right remediation? Do we interstitial the video?” asks one employee, in despair:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 57. This “Freedom or Death” tweet from #StopTheSteal gadfly Mike Coudrey elicits heated reactions:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 58. Roth groans about Coudrey: “THIS asshole,” but still seems determined to stick at least superficially to rules, itching to act “if” this “constitutes incitement.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 59. At 2:39 p.m. PST, a comms official asked Roth to confirm or deny a story that they’d restricted Trump’s ability to tweet. Roth says, “We have not.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 60. Minutes later, Roth executed the historic act of “bouncing” Trump, i.e. putting him in timeout. “I hope you… are appropriately CorpSec’d,” says a colleague.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods This theme of Policy perhaps being stressed by queries from Communications executives – who themselves have to answer the public’s questions – occasionally appears. Two days later, you see chatter about pulling Comms out of the loop:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 61. The first company-wide email from Gadde on January 6th announced that 3 Trump tweets had been bounced, but more importantly signaled a determination to use legit “violations” as a guide for any possible permanent suspension:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 62. “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?” Safe to say Trump’s “Go home with love & in peace” tweet mid-riot didn’t go over well at Twitter HQ:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 63. A few last notes about January 6th. Roth at one point looked and found Trump had a slew of duplicate bot applications:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 64. By the end of the first day, the top execs are still trying to apply rules. By the next day, they will contemplate a major change in approach. Watch @shellenbergerMD this weekend for the play-by-play of how all that went down.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 65. By January 8th, which @BariWeiss will describe Sunday, Twitter will be receiving plaudits from “our partners” in Washington, and the sitting U.S. president will no longer be heard on the platform.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 66. Lastly, people on the left, right, and in between want to know what else is in the #TwitterFiles, from suppression/shadow-banning of leftists to lab-leak theorists, or amplification of military propaganda or conservative accounts. We know everyone has questions.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 67. And while we’ve stumbled on tidbits here and there about topics ranging from COVID to foreign policy, the reality is the data sets are enormous and we’re still working through them.

More is coming. Good night, all.

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More from @mtaibbi

Dec 9, 2022
1. THREAD: The Twitter Files
THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP
Part One: October 2020-January 6th
2. The world knows much of the story of what happened between riots at the Capitol on January 6th, and the removal of President Donald Trump from Twitter on January 8th...
3. We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies.
Read 28 tweets

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