by Sharon Rondeau
(Dec. 12, 2022) — At 1:06 p.m. EST, journalist Bari Weiss published “Part Five” of the “Twitter Files” consisting of internal communications among Twitter employees leading to the suspension of the account belonging to the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, on January 8, 2021.
“On the morning of January 8, President Donald Trump, with one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension from Twitter, tweets twice,” Weiss began the fifth tranche of data released by new Twitter CEO Elon Musk.
Weiss then highlighted the first of Trump’s two tweets: “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 third tweet that day, Weiss reported, was Trump’s having stated he would not attend the Biden inauguration.
Nos. 4 and 5 provide background preceding Twitter’s decision to suspend Trump, quoting from the company’s stated “mission…to provide a forum that enables people to be informed and to engage their leaders directly.”
The page refers to Twitter’s “public interest” policy on “world leaders” in which certain content was unequivocally banned but otherwise, moderators were to “err on the side of leaving the content up if there is a clear public interest in doing so.”
As the thread continued, Weiss produced internal Twitter exchanges showing that not all company employees believed Trump had violated any of their policies, including senior managers. However, Weiss wrote, “But voices like that one appear to have been a distinct minority within the company. Across Slack channels, many Twitter employees were upset that Trump hadn’t been banned earlier.”
“In the early afternoon of January 8, The Washington Post published an open letter signed by over 300 Twitter employees to CEO Jack Dorsey demanding Trump’s ban,” Weiss reported, quoting from the letter, “We must examine Twitter’s complicity in what President-Elect Biden has rightly termed insurrection.”
The Post reported that day, in part, “Twitter on Friday banned President Trump from its site, a punishment for his role in inciting violence at the U.S. Capitol this week, robbing him of the megaphone he used to communicate directly with more than 88 million supporters and critics.”
The letter demonstrates that Twitter employees blamed the company for allegedly contributing to the January 6 “insurrection.”
On January 8, 2021, The Verge quoted from the letter, adding, “Twitter employees have been pushing back against leadership in company-wide Slack rooms as well. ‘I feel like we’ve bent over backwards to craft policies to allow Trump to stay up and to say what he has,’ one employee wrote.”
In additions to her thread, Weiss reported that Twitter “Safety” official Anika Navaroli determined that Trump’s tweet about the inauguration did not violate any policies. “Later,” Weiss continued in #17, “Navaroli would testify to the House Jan. 6 committee: ‘For months I had been begging and anticipating and attempting to raise the reality that if nothing–if we made no intervention into what I saw occuring, [sic] people were going to die.'”
In September CNN reported Navaroli’s testimony to the committee after Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) identified her, which included Weiss’s quote and, “On January 5 I realized no intervention was coming, and even as hard as I had tried to create one or implement one there was nothing. We were at the whims and mercy of a violent crowd that was locked and loaded.”
A portion of Navaroli’s testimony can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deeTQPjZzsA
“Navaroli was the most predominant Twitter employee to publicly testify about Jan. 6,” ABC News reported on October 13, 2022, although she was identified as a “former Twitter employee” as her testimony began at 2:15 in the video.
It does not appear Navaroli’s testimony was taken live, but rather, pre-recorded in a private deposition, as were other segments of the committee’s “hearings” in the video.
“I wouldn’t be doing this [coming forward] if I didn’t believe the truth matters,” Navaroli was quoted as having told The Washington Post on September 22.
“Navaroli is the most prominent Twitter insider known to have challenged the tech giant’s conduct toward Trump in the years before the Capitol riot,” The Post further reported. “Now in her 30s and living in California, she worries that speaking up about her role inside Twitter on Jan. 6 could lead to threats or real-world harm.”