Twitter executives decided to ban then-President Donald Trump from their social media platform after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, while maintaining regular check-ins with the FBI and other federal authorities as they decided what postings should be targeted for censorship, the latest report from new company CEO Elon Musk reveals.
In one of a series of tweets Friday evening, independent journalist Matt Taibbi said internal company messages showed how Twitter’s internal standards eroded during the months leading up to Jan. 6, with high-ranking executives violating their own policies while interacting with various federal agencies.
Taibbi posted messages that he said “show Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies.”
In one, Yoel Roth, then Twitter’s head of trust and safety, appears to describe how he struggled to disguise the purpose of weekly meetings with FBI and other government officials that helped guide the company’s decisions on policing posts on its platform.
“I’m a big believer in calendar transparency. But I reached a certain point where my meetings became…very interesting…to people and there weren’t meeting names generic enough to cover,” he wrote.
Another message shows Yoel Roth, lamenting the personal fallout from Twitter’s apparently on-the-fly decision to suppress The Post’s exclusive, October 2020 scoop about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop on the unfounded assertion it was based on “hacked materials.”
“We blocked the NYP story, then we unblocked it (but said the opposite)…and now we’re in a messy situation where our policy is in shambles, comms [public relations] is angry, reporters think we’re idiots and refactoring an exceedingly complex policy 18 days out from the election,” he wrote.
Roth added: “In short, FML [f–k my life].
