TWITTER FILES: Junior Employee Warned Of “Slippery Slope” By Banning Trump, But His Message Fell On Deaf Ears

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According to internal Twitter documents released in the latest installment of the “Twitter Files”, a thread of slack messages reveal a junior staffer being largely ignored when sounding the alarm by expressing  concerns of a “slippery slope” if the company banned Trump.

This message was posted in a lower-level channel on the company’s internal Slack system, so it gained no traction even though this person seemed to be the only sane one in the room. He questioned the “one off” nature of the decision, which had no basis based on Twitter’s public policies.

“This might be an unpopular opinion but one off ad hoc decisions like this that don’t appear rooted in policy are [in my opinion] a slippery slope and reflect an alternatively equally dictatorial problem,” the staffer wrote, according to Shellenberger’s Twitter leaks.

“This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world – which seems unsustainable,” the staffer added.

Look below:

The Daily Caller adds this reporting:

Roughly 40 minutes after the junior staffer posted their initial concerns, they sent a follow-up message, citing an article by The Washington Post’s Will Oremus, then a writer for tech publication OneZero, which noted that Facebook’s decision to indefinitely ban Trump “lacks a clear basis in any of Facebook’s previously stated policies, highlights for the millionth time that the dominant platforms are quite literally making up the rules of online speech as they go along,” Shellenberger reported.

“My concern is specifically surrounding the unarticulated logic of the decision by FB,” the staffer wrote, according to Shellenberger. “That space fills with the idea (conspiracy theory?) that all … internet moguls … sit around like kings casually deciding what people can and cannot see.”

While Twitter employees debated the decision to ban Trump, then-CEO Jack Dorsey was on vacation in French Polynesia, ultimately delegating a significant amount of the company’s actions during the crisis to former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth and former head of Legal, Policy and Trust Vijaya Gadde, Shellenberger reported. Dorsey sent staffers an email on Jan. 7 telling employees that the company needs to maintain consistent moderation policies, according to Shellenberger.

As we reported last night on TrendingPolitics, the newest batch of Twitter files showed the decisions that went into wrongly banning President Trump from the platform:

The series of events that follows shows exactly how they went about changing their rules and also displays the internal corruption that the company had before it was bought by Elon Musk.

Following that message where someone clearly wanted to stay consistent with policies, Roth the Twitter Exec featured above shares gleefully how they plan on changing the rules. Check it out below:

Roth shows below just how the company continues to go about changing the rules as the news begins to break:

Despite not banning Trump in the messages shown above, Twitter clearly is laying the precedent for banning Donald Trump. Sure enough, the foreshadowing above displays their initial motive for banning Trump and the result of their actions can be seen below:

Just one day after changing their own rules of the playing field, they set their trap and intentionally try to catch Donald Trump in it claiming that he is at risk of of further “incitement of violence.”

What happens next is damning. On January 8th, 2020, Twitter backs up their ban of Donald Trump claiming that the sitting President’s tweet’s deserve to be banned because of how they may be “received and interpreted.”

What’s even crazier is that just a year prior, Twitter announced that the company did “not attempt to determine all potential interpretations of the content or its intent.”  Check out that evidence in the tweet below:





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