Comment A former Twitter employee told a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising that the company gave former President Donald Trump more lenient treatment because he enjoyed the “power” his stature lent to the social network. Tuesday’s testimony marked the first time a former Twitter insider testified under oath about the company’s role in giving Trump the megaphone he used to attack an angry crowd to attack Capitol Hill. Trump had 88 million followers when Twitter “permanently suspended” him two days after the riot, citing fears he could incite further violence. However, the suspension followed years of calls for his account to be banned due to tweets containing harassment, conspiracy theories and viral lies. The former Twitter employee said the company considered adopting a stricter content moderation policy after Trump, in a September 2020 presidential debate, told the far-right extremist group Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” “My concern was that the former president, seemingly for the first time, was speaking directly to extremist organizations and giving them instructions. We had never seen this kind of direct communication before, and that worried me,” the former employee said. Trump’s tweet promoting Jan. 6 protest turned into ‘openly homicidal’ online plot, panel says But Twitter, the former employee said, ultimately decided not to change, allowing Trump to continue tweeting without restrictions. Many of those tweets — including one in December in which he wrote: “Big protest in DC Jan 6th. Be there, it’s going to be wild!” — were seen by Trump supporters as calls to war, the panel said. “Twitter was happy to know that it was also the former president’s favorite and most used service, and they enjoyed having that kind of power in the social media ecosystem,” the official said. If Trump were “any other Twitter user, he would have been permanently suspended a long time ago.” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) said the former staffer had worked on a team responsible for platform and content moderation policies in 2020 and 2021. The person was not named and his voice was masked with voice-modulation software . Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, Twitter’s vice president of public policy for the Americas, said in a statement that the company is “clear-eyed about our role in the broader intelligence ecosystem” regarding the Jan. 6 attack, but that it “took unprecedented steps and invested significant resources in preparing for and responding to emerging threats” during the 2020 elections. TheDonald’s owner talks about why he finally took down the hate-filled site The company, he said, has deployed “many policy and product interventions to protect public discourse,” including designating the Proud Boys as a violent extremist group in 2018 and permanently suspending accounts associated with the group and organizers of the Capitol siege . But the former employee said they pleaded with Twitter executives for months “trying to bring out the reality that … if we didn’t intervene in what I saw happening, people would die.” Twitter witness: Trump spoke ‘directly’ to extremists “And no matter how hard I tried to create one or implement it, there was nothing,” the former employee added. “We were at the whim, at the mercy of a violent mob that was locked and loaded.” The former Twitter employee said that, the night before the riots, they tried and failed to get the company to intervene by flagging violent extremist content on the site again. “When people shoot each other tomorrow, I’ll try to rest knowing that we tried,” the former Twitter employee said they wrote in an internal Slack message on the evening of January 5, 2021. “I don’t know. I slept that night, because to be honest with you. I was on pins and needles.” The revelation inspired great outrage among some tech advocates. Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, tweeted that the hearing showed that Twitter, YouTube and other social media platforms were complicit in helping Trump supporters stage the bloody riot. Big Tech “enabled insurgents to plan their violence,” he tweeted. Facebook groups topped 10,000 daily election attacks before January 6, analysis shows Members of the company argued that Twitter was just one way Trump was amplifying his rhetoric on the world stage. But Twitter was by far his most important: his Facebook account, which was also suspended after the January 6 riots, has 34 million followers. His account on Truth Social, the new Twitter clone he created after his ban, has about 3 million. Trump’s 56,571 tweets between 2009 and 2021 were often retweeted hundreds of thousands of times. Trump tweeted 600 times during his first impeachment and, after losing the 2020 election, used the platform for weeks to spread lies about how he was the victim of an international conspiracy to steal votes. Tuesday’s hearing, which focused on how Trump helped drive far-right groups to Washington before the riots, revealed that Trump’s Dec. 19 tweet followed an “unbroken” meeting between White House lawyers and Trump associates .
