Twitter gave Trump leniency out of fear of backlash, Jan. 6 committee says
Christopher Hutton
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Twitter employees gave then-President Donald Trump leniency on the platform in the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riots out of fear of the backlash that could arise if they limited his presence, new documents reveal.
Twitter employees gave Trump special treatment and delayed enforcing rules to penalize him for false information, according to a draft report from the Jan. 6 Select Committee, which detailed social media companies’ role in promoting misinformation around the 2020 election.
While the Dec. 23 draft report only details Trump’s role in the events of Jan. 6, the committee’s work on social networks was diminished by committee leadership in an attempt to focus more on the president than the Big Tech companies involved. One of the most notable platforms was Twitter, which was the former president’s largest online presence.
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“Twitter was terrified of the backlash they would get if they followed their own rules and applied them to Donald Trump,” one former employee told the committee, according to the Washington Post.
The select committee’s staff who focused on social media and extremism, known as “Team Purple,” spent over a year digging through internal documents and interviewing executives and staff from the companies. The staff sent subpoenas to several tech companies, including the private server-based Discord and the alt-right platform Gab.
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The staff’s work led the committee to conclude that most social platforms were prepared enough for Election Day. However, their delayed response to “far-right extremism” allowed organizers to orchestrate Jan. 6. The missteps included Facebook’s failure to police Stop the Steal groups, Reddit’s yearlong quarantine of r/the_Donald, and YouTube’s inability to quell disinformation, according to the committee.