Twitter Files Part 3 reveals how top execs interfered with US election before ban on Trump

Twitter Files part 3 are out now and journalist Matt Taibbi, who used to work earlier for the Intercept and now has a Substack of his own, is covering the time period from October 6th, 2020 to January 6th 2021. The chaos inside Twitter on 7th January will be covered by Michael Shellenberger and January 8th will be covered by Bari Weiss, who is an independent journalist and used to work for the New York Times before. It is not clear what is Twitter chief Elon Musk's motivation behind releasing these documents. Bari Weiss has written that the only thing they agreed to in exchange for access to the documents is that they will write about the story on Twitter first, before publishing it on their sites and Substack.

The documents that journalist Matt Taibbi has uploaded on Twitter are the conversations from the company's internal Slack, which employees at the company use to communicate with each other. Taibbi has reported that although Donald Trump was banned after the January 6th protests on Capitol Hill, the intellectual foundations to banning him were laid quite some time ago. On 8th October, 2020, executives at Twitter opened a new Slack channel called "us2020_xfn_enforcement". By January 6th, this channel was being used to discuss removals related to the elections and especially the "high profile" accounts. This was different from Twitter's Safety Operations. 

Tensions and divisions within Twitter 

Twitter's Safety Operations was a larger department and its focus was on content like porn, scams and threats. This department adopted a rules-based process towards content moderation. There was a significant amount of tension between this group and the "smaller, more powerful cadre of senior policy execs like Roth and Gadde". Unlike the first group, the 2nd group did not really follow any rules based approach and took down content based on their own whims, guesses and random Google searches, even in the case of tweets made by Donald Trump, who was president at that time. 

Twitter's relationship with intelligence agencies 

The Twitter Files reveal that during this same time, Twitter executives were meeting with intelligence agencies. They met with not just the FBI and DHS but the office of DNI (Director of National Intelligence) as well. Taibbi mentions an example of a tweet by a Republican named John Basham. Basham claimed that around 2 percent to 25 percent of mail in ballots are being rejected for error. FBI raised this tweet to Twitter and Twitter's internal Slack channel reveals that some executives thought it was completely "normal" to have a 2 percent error rate, implying that the concern about voter fraud is not legitimate. A story from Politifact was used to conclude that the tweet was "false". Twitter termed its collusion with government agencies "partnership" and executives like Yoel Roth boasted about meeting with intelligence and FBI officials. 

After Elon Musk decided to make the Twitter files public, one way in which the revelations are being countered is on the basis of the claim that Democratic party telling Twitter to take down some tweets is completely normal and Republicans did it as well, the root claim being that the Twitter files do not reveal bias as Twitter was doing the same for Republicans. Matt Taibii has reported that he and other journalists are "examining the entire election enforcement Slack, we didn’t see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally. We looked. They may exist: we were told they do. However, they were absent here". He also added that there are a lot of documents about Twitter's meetings with intelligence officials and they are still going through the documents. Twitter "executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content. While we’re still at the start of reviewing the #TwitterFiles, we’re finding out more about these interactions every day".