Twitter Files: Part 4 reveals how platform made up policies on the fly to ban Donald Trump

Part 4 of Twitter files is out and it shows how executives changed their own policies so that they could ban Donald Trump. The part 4 of Twitter files was published by journalist Michael Shellenberger and it covers what occured at Twitter on January 7th, i.e. a day after the protests by Donald Trump supporters at Capitol Hill went haywire. Shellenberger, by citing Twitter's own words, proves that Twitter had a policy against banning world leaders and in fact a policy that was even opposed to removing thrit controversial tweets. 

"Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions," read Twitter's policy. After January 6, 2021, Twitter started receiving pressure from multiple sources to permanently ban the sitting US President. Twitter's CEO at that time, Jack Dorsey, was vacationing in French Polynesia. He delegated much of the responsibility to Yoel Roth and Vijaya Gadde. Twitter's staff is extremely partisan. Shellenberger's report states that in the 2018, 2020 and 2022, 96 percent, 98 percent and 99 percent of Twitter staff's political donations went to the Democratic party.

Partisanship of Twitter employees 

To get a sense of how partisan they are, consider Yoel Roth's tweet from 2017, where he says that there are "actual Nazis in the White House". Nazis, amongst many other things, were responsible for the genocide of jews. Donald Trump, who Yoel Roth was talking about, has a jewish daughter, jewish son in law and is quite pro-Israel. So, Yoel Roth isn't a Democrat because he prefers higher taxation on capital gains, he is a Democrat because he subscribes to a very specific ideology of wokeness. On January 7 last year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sent an email to employees saying that Twitter must remain consistent in its policies, highlighting that Twitter users should have a right to return to the platform after temporary suspension. Roth talks about this email with an employee and tells the employee that they should not worry about Jack's views, saying "I think people want to hear from Vijaya".

Formulating policies on the fly 

At around 11:30 am, pacific time, Roth informs colleagues that Jack has approved a new system where a user will receive "strikes" for violation and five "strikes" will result in permanent suspension. This is how Twitter came up with a policy to ban the President of the US. No one in Twitter expressed concern about the direction Twitter was taking, except one junior level employee, who said "this might be an unpopular opinion but one off ad hoc decisions like this that don't appear rooted in policy are imho (in my honest opinion) a slippery slope...This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world". 

The fact that policies were being made up on the fly is revealed by the interaction between Roth and a senior executive in advertising and sales. The advertising and sales senior executive asks "Jack says: 'we will permanently suspend [Trump] if our policies are violated after a 12 hour account lock'… what policies is Jack talking about?" to which Roth replies "*ANY* policy violation". The senior executive asks Roth a question again, struggling to comprehend what is happening. "In the past, we "exempted policy violation" from a world leader due to the public interest value..are we dropping the public interest [policy] now...?". Roth responds to this query 6 hours later by writing that in the specific case of Trump's account, Twitter is changing its public interest approach.