Meetings with the FBI and visibility filters: the new revelations of how Twitter blocked Trump’s account

Journalist Matt Taibbi said that the platform’s executives opened an internal channel that would be “the home for discussions about election-related removals, especially those involving high-profile accounts.”

This Friday the third installment of the “Twitter Archives” was published, the “investigative series” of a group of journalists who expose the alleged censorship of the bird’s social network to different issues of public interest.

The tweets of the day were carried out by journalist Matt Taibbi, who referred to the blocking of the account of former US President Donald Trump by the platform’s executives.

According to Taibbi, Twitter’s top managers decided to ban then-President Donald Trump from accessing his social media account following the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, while maintaining regular checks with the FBI. and other federal authorities while deciding which publications should be censored.

It reported that on October 8, 2020, executives opened an internal channel titled “us2020_xfn_enforcement,” which would be “the home for discussions of election-related takedowns, especially those involving high-profile accounts.”

He pointed out that the platform’s managers occasionally met with officials from federal agencies and referred, in particular, to the global director of Trust and Security, Yoel Roth, who said in a message that he met some “very interesting” people.

“I’m a big believer in transparency, but I got to a certain point where my meetings got…very interesting…” he wrote.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk shared a series of tweets by journalist Bari Weiss, who revealed that the microblogging platform “created blacklists,” “prevented unfavorable posts from trending,” and “actively limited the visibility of entire accounts or even viral topics” without informing the subscribers of the social network.

According to another message, Roth held regular meetings not only with officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security, but also with personnel from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In one of the posts from Yoel Roth, then Twitter’s head of trust and security, he describes how he struggled to disguise the purpose of weekly meetings with the FBI and other government officials who help guide the company’s decisions about surveillance. Posts on your platform.

Another message shows Yoel Roth, lamenting the consequences of Twitter’s decision to suppress The New York Post’s October 2020 exclusive on the Hunter Biden case where there was talk of “hacked material” on his personal notebook.

“We blocked the NYP story, then we unblocked it (but said otherwise) and now we’re in a sticky situation where our politics are in shambles, PR is a mess, journalists think we’re idiots, and we’re refactoring a policy. extremely complex 18 days before the election,” Roth wrote.

The journalist added that “a visibility filter” was used against Trump’s tweets even when they did not contain “a specific violation.” Meanwhile, the senior management of the social network preferred not to limit the visibility of tweets in favor of Biden, warning that Trump “could try to steal the elections.”

On December 10, 2020, as Trump was actively denouncing “a coup” in the US, Twitter announced to employees the creation of a new “L3 deamp” tool, which means that a warning label would also “restrict the measure in that that tweet can be shared,” Taibbi wrote.

All these facts, according to the journalist, show that “Twitter, at least in 2020, was deploying a wide range of visible and invisible tools to stop Trump’s participation, long before January 6, 2020,” when the assault occurred. of the Capitol. “The ban will come after they exhaust other avenues”

On Thursday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk shared a series of tweets from journalist Bari Weiss, who revealed that the microblogging platform “created blacklists,” “prevented unfavorable posts from trending,” and “actively limited the visibility of entire accounts or even viral topics” without informing the subscribers of the social network.

According to Weiss, one of the many “blacklists” created included several prominent personalities and activists, including: Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya, who argued that “COVID-19 lockdowns would harm children; American presenter Dan Bongino and conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

“The social network denied that it did any such things,” Weiss added.

He also indicated that Twitter used visibility filters to “suppress what people see at different levels”, individual user searches were blocked, the scope of certain tweets was limited and Internet user posts were suppressed so that they did not appear even in the trends or the hashtags of the platform.