The latest installment of the Elon Musk-endorsed “Twitter files,” published on Dec. 12, revealed more internal details about how and why the social media platform suspended former President Donald Trump’s account in January 2021.
In a Twitter thread, journalist Bari Weiss, a former New York Times editor who quit in 2020, recalled what Trump had written on Jan. 8, 2021, which referred to the results of the 2020 election. She noted that Trump had “one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension.”
One post by Trump on Jan. 8 was: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
The second one he issued that day would be his last before his account was banned: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
“For years, Twitter had resisted calls both internal and external to ban Trump on the grounds that blocking a world leader from the platform or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information that people should be able to see and debate,” Weiss wrote on Dec. 12. “But after January 6, as @mtaibbi and @shellenbergermd have documented, pressure grew, both inside and outside of Twitter, to ban Trump.”
While some Twitter staffers disagreed with claims that Trump was trying to incite violence with the Twitter posts, according to company Slack message screenshots that were published in her thread, some employees—whose names were redacted—were angry that Trump wasn’t banned earlier. After the Capitol breach on Jan. 6, 2021, even more company workers demanded his ouster from the platform, those messages revealed.
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