The fifth installment of
Elon Musk's "Twitter Files" Monday revealed that staffers believed that tweets written by former President Trump around the events of Jan. 6 had not actually violated its policies despite the company saying so at the time.
"For years, Twitter had resisted calls both internal and external to ban Trump on the grounds that blocking a world leader from the platform or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information that people should be able to see and debate," Bari Weiss of The Free Press wrote towards the beginning of her thread on Monday. "But after January 6, as @mtaibbi and @shellenbergermd have documented, pressure grew, both inside and outside of Twitter, to ban Trump."
Weiss cited "dissenters" within Twitter that did not want to ban Trump, including one who wrote, "Maybe because I am from China. I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation."
"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," Weiss wrote. "After January 6, Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump. ‘There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,’ said one Twitter employee."