The Twitter Files Part III: The Banning of Donald Trump

The Twitter Files Part III: The Banning of Donald Trump

By Jeff Charles | 7:39 PM on December 09, 2022 

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AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura

Elon Musk has released the third installment of “The Twitter Files,” detailing the decision to ban former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Only a day after the company dropped the second installment related to the company’s content moderation practices, the company is now divulging the forces surrounding the decision to remove the former president from the platform.

What is noteworthy about this release is that it also discusses Twitter’s collaboration with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) when it comes to moderating the platform. Journalist Matt Taibbi, who released the first part of the series, notes that “the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import” and that the company’s employees “understood in the moment that it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech.”

5. Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import. Even Twitter’s employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech. pic.twitter.com/tQ01n58XFc

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

The journalist explains how Twitter executives “started processing new power” after they banned Trump and laid the groundwork for future decisions regarding the banning of presidents.” The employees said the Biden administration would “not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.”

6. As soon as they finished banning Trump, Twitter execs started processing new power. They prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses – perhaps even Joe Biden. The “new administration,” says one exec, “will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.” pic.twitter.com/lr66YgDlGy

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

Twitter executives said they removed Trump because of the “context surrounding” the actions of Trump and his supporters throughout the 2020 election season.

7. Twitter executives removed Trump in part over what one executive called the “context surrounding”: actions by Trump and supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.” In the end, they looked at a broad picture. But that approach can cut both ways. pic.twitter.com/Trgvq5jmhS

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

Prior to the riot, the company employed a more “subjective moderation” approach.

9. Before J6, Twitter was a unique mix of automated, rules-based enforcement, and more subjective moderation by senior executives. As @BariWeissreported, the firm had a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, most all of which were thrown at Trump (and others) pre-J6.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

Taibbi notes that after the riot, communications on Slack showed Twitter executives “getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies.”

The journalist goes on to discuss a Slack channel in which Twitter would converse about “election-related removals,” particularly related to “ accounts, which are called “VITs,” or “Very Important Tweeters.” He wrote:

On October 8th, 2020, executives opened a channel called “us2020_xfn_enforcement.” Through J6, this would be home for discussions about election-related removals, especially ones that involved “high-profile” accounts (often called “VITs” or “Very Important Tweeters”).

14. On October 8th, 2020, executives opened a channel called “us2020_xfn_enforcement.” Through J6, this would be home for discussions about election-related removals, especially ones that involved “high-profile” accounts (often called “VITs” or “Very Important Tweeters”). pic.twitter.com/xH29h4cYt9

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

The smaller group consisting of former CEO Jack Dorsey, former head of legal, policy, and trust Vijaya Gadde, and former cybersecurity head Yoel Roth, were a “high-speed Supreme Court of moderation,” according to Taibbi. They made content moderation decisions “on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President.”

It appears these individuals did not put much thought into decisions to ban, or otherwise punish, accounts tweeting views with which they disagreed.

16. The latter group were a high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President. pic.twitter.com/5ihsPCVo62

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

Meanwhile, these executives were “clearly liasing” with federal agencies regarding the moderation of content related to the 2020 election.

17. During this time, 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.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

In fact, Roth met weekly with officials from the FBI and DHS, and also the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI):

20. This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI): pic.twitter.com/s5IiUjQqIY

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

In a report to these three agencies, Roth wrote:

We blocked the NYP story, then we unblocked it (but said the opposite) … and now we’re in a messy situation where our policy is in shambles, comms is angry, reporters think we’re idiots, and we’re refactoring an exceedingly complex policy 18 days out from the election.

21. Roth’s report to FBI/DHS/DNI is almost farcical in its self-flagellating tone:
“We blocked the NYP story, then unblocked it (but said the opposite)… comms is angry, reporters think we’re idiots… in short, FML” (fuck my life). pic.twitter.com/sTaWglhaJt

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

The FBI even sent Twitter reports highlighting certain tweets, one of which involved Indiana Councilor and Republican named John Basham in which he said: “Between 2% and 25% of Ballots by Mail are Being Rejected for Errors.”

24. Here, the FBI sends reports about a pair of tweets, the second of which involves a former Tippecanoe County, Indiana Councilor and Republican named @JohnBasham claiming “Between 2% and 25% of Ballots by Mail are Being Rejected for Errors.” pic.twitter.com/KtigHOiEwF

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 10, 2022

Twitter decided that these tweets were “proven to be false” and that one of them was “no vio on numerous occasions.”

25. The FBI-flagged tweet then got circulated in the enforcement Slack. Twitter cited Politifact to say the first story was “proven to be false,” then noted the second was already deemed “no vio on numerous occasions.” pic.twitter.com/LyyZ1opWAh

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 10, 2022

What is also noteworthy is that the journalists did not “see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally.”

27. 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.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 10, 2022

The company also prepared to put a “mail-in voting is safe” warning label on a tweet from Trump calling out a voting mishap in Ohio that involved mail-in ballots. They decided against it after realizing that “the events took place” which means the former president’s tweet was “factually accurate.”

35. In another example, Twitter employees prepare to slap a “mail-in voting is safe” warning label on a Trump tweet about a postal screwup in Ohio, before realizing “the events took place,” which meant the tweet was “factually accurate”: pic.twitter.com/4r6nJ3JDmY

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 10, 2022

Even more damning is that Trump was “visibility filtered” about a week before the election despite not appearing “to have a particular violation.” Employees worked quickly to ensure that any of Trump’s tweets could not be “replied to, shared, or liked.”

Taibbi indicated at the beginning of the thread that more drops would be coming on Saturday and Sunday further explaining the decision to ban Trump as well as other issues. Journalists Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger are expected to handle the next batch of information.

Lincoln Project

Abraham Lincoln

The Lincoln Project is an American political action committee (PAC) formed in late 2019 by former and current Republicans. During the 2020 presidential election, it aimed to prevent the re-election of Donald Trump and defeat all Republicans in close races running for re-election in the United States Senate. In April 2020, the committee endorsedDemocratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Strategies

The Lincoln Project’s output has been prolific in terms of both tweets and videos. The group’s ads sometimes made use of comedy, as in the ad Trumpfeld (a spoof of Seinfeld), in which laugh tracks are laid over segments of a Chris Wallace interview with Trump,and in Nationalist Geographic (a spoof of National Geographic), which mocks Trump as “Impotus americanus,” “the most corrupt of its species.”

Joanna Weiss of Northeastern University‘s Experience magazine wrote in Politico that most of the Lincoln Project’s ads “pack an emotional punch, using imagery designed to provoke anxiety, anger and fear—aimed at the very voters who were driven to (Trump) by those same feelings in 2016”, citing scientific research indicating that fear-mongering ads might be effective with Republican voters. Project co-founder Reed Galen described the strategy as “(speaking) to Republican voters with Republican language and Republican iconography”

The Lincoln Project was criticized by former Romney campaign staffer Oren Cass, who described it as “a group of political operatives who are not conservatives.” Writing in The Atlantic, Andrew Ferguson described the ads as “personally abusive, overwrought, pointlessly salacious, and trip-wired with non sequiturs.” Rich Lowry, writing for the conservative publication National Review, described the Lincoln Project’s stated goals as “self-serving tripe, as a glance at the insult-filled Twitter feeds, op-eds, and cable appearances of the principals instantly demonstrates”, and described the group’s advertisements as being “clearly meant to garner retweets rather than to speak to on-the-fence voters.” Jeet Heer wrote in The Nation that “To the extent that the ads articulate any political vision, it is a desire to return to the hard-line military aggression of the George W. Bush era.” Heer also wrote in March 2021: “The ineffectiveness of the ads should be no surprise. Twenty twenty was a polarizing election… In that environment, the Lincoln Project made the wrong arguments to the wrong voters”, and described the group as a “successful scam”.

In addition to targeting the Washington media market and thus Trump himself, the project has also targeted swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and has spent money against Republican Senate candidates in Arizona, Iowa, Montana, and other states. As summarized by Lenti after the election, “we were focused on Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia. […] We were looking at college-educated women, suburban women, older men.”The project has identified a faction within the Republican Party which seems to disenfranchise African American voters as the Jim Crow caucus.

Fundraising and expenditures

OpenSecrets, which tracks money spent on politics, reported that the Lincoln Project raised $87,404,908 and spent $81,956,298 during the 2019-2020 election cycle. $51,406,346 came from individuals who had donated $200 or more. (An earlier estimate was $78 million from its creation until the November 2020 election.) By the end of March 2020, it had raised $2.6 million in contributions. Its fundraising substantially increased in subsequent months; from July to September 2020, the Lincoln Project raised $39 million.The group started out with few major donors; as of October 2020, about 39% of contributions to the group came from small donors ($200 or less). This is an unusually high proportion of small-dollar donors for a super PAC; most super PACs are almost exclusively funded by wealthy contributors. The top contributors are classical musician and Getty family heir Gordon Getty ($1 million), Stephen Mandel ($1 million); and the Sixteen Thirty Fund ($300,000). Six-figure contributions came from Hollywood producer David Geffen, investor John Pritzker and financier Jonathan Lavine. Other major donors include Silicon Valley investors Ron Conway, Michael Moritz and Chris Sacca, financier Andrew Redleaf, Walmart heiress and philanthropist Christy Walton, Martha Karsh (who is married to billionaire financier Bruce Karsh), and Continental Cablevision CEO Amos Hostetter Jr.As of May 2020, the group’s expenditures were mostly in producing, buying, and placing ads. OpenSecrets, a campaign-finance watchdog group, wrote at the time that (like most PACs) most of the Lincoln Project’s money had gone to pay subcontractors, “making it difficult to follow the money” to vendors, and that “almost all” of the money raised had gone to firms run by the group’s board members, specifically Galen’s Summit Strategic Communications and Steslow’s Tusk Digital. $50 million of the $90 million raised went to firms controlled by the group’s leaders, according to a February 2021 AP News report. The Lincoln Project eventually grew to an organization of over 40 employees and over 60 interns.

Members of The Lincoln Project

Founders

Advisors

See also

WOW: More than 12.5 Million Watched Trump’s 2024 Announcement LIVE Despite Mainstream Media Blackout

The numbers are completely in yet, but one thing we know is that at least 12.5 million Americans watched former President Donald J. Trump’s 2024 …

WOW: More than 12.5 Million Watched Trump’s 2024 Announcement LIVE Despite Mainstream Media Blackout

“PEACEFULLY AND PATRIOTICALLY”

October 13, 2022-Final Letter

President Donald Trump Letter to The Honorable Bennie G. Thompson, Chairperson of Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol

Screenshots of Letter from President Donald Trump (link at bottom)

Peacefully and Patriotically

To view online click the link below.

Peacefully and Patriotically October 13, 2022-final-letter

Bigly: Donald Trump Drops First Political Ad On Truth Social, HUMILIATES Joe Biden

Bigly: Donald Trump Drops First Political Ad On Truth Social, HUMILIATES Joe Biden

May 9, 2022

I am not sure what to make of Truth Social yet. Rumors are that Trump encouraged Elon Musk to purchase Twitter and, once it happened, expressed contentment to stay on his own platform instead of hopping back ogver to his tens of millions of loyal followers.

Time will tell what happens with all of this social media rejiggering. One thing is certain, though, and that’s the fact that Donald Trump is laying the foundation for one of the most epic political comebacks in history.

Hyperbole? Not if you consider the fact that he got impeached twice and has had his fellow patriots deemed the worst extremisst in history. He ahd his Twitter account delerted – while still functioning as the Commander-in-Chief. They hate Trump. They hate all of us.

And that is what makes this ad so sweet and delicious. In fifty-eight glorious seconds, Trump exposes Joe Biden, the Democrat machine, and every single one of the actual voters who cast a ballot for Sleepy Joe as utter fools. Enjoy:

“Weak. Unprepared. Incapable. Unstable.”

If those aren’t four words summarizing Biden and his entire administration, I don’t know what could do it better.

When I watched the ad for the first time, and knowing it was from Trump, I expected something different. This isn’t Trump’s style at all. What I mean by that is…there wasn’t any Trump. No speeches, no ooh rahs, just a montage of bumbling, fumbling, stumbling Joe Biden as he slips going up stairs, stammers through speeches, and whispers creepily for what feels like forever.

The big question still remains: What is Donald Trump going to do in 2024? Perhaps an equally exciting question is what will Trump do in 2022? After all, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) suggested that Donald Trump would be the next Speaker of the House come the red wave in November. This idea has existed since Joe Biden was inaugurated.

Is there a downside to Speaker Trump? I can hardly see one. If Trump thrives on visibility, what better way to be a gigantic thorn in the left’s side by grabbing the gavel from the corrupt and vile Nancy Pelosi, and then showing up everywhere in media and television to say Trumpish things regarding Brandon and Kamala. The idea that he could sit behind Joe Biden at the next State of the Union would probably be reason enough to make Covid come back, just so that the SOTU would have to be held virtually.

One thing is for certain, though. Democrats are going to get trounced in the midterms. Trump has always been politically savvy for himself, but now he might be getting savvy for the entire MAGA movement. This ad serves one purpose: Reminding voters to remove Dems from office in November. Joe Biden is the figurehead for the entire failed experiement of Demcorat control.

Election 2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud Findings from Various Sources

What went down at the TCF Center?

Trump Shares His Thoughts on Transgender Athletes Competing in Women’s Sports

Trump Shares His Thoughts on Transgender Athletes Competing in Women’s Sports

Trump Shares His Thoughts on Transgender Athletes Competing in Women’s Sports

Source: AP Photo/Josh Reynolds

In an interview this week, former President Donald Trump called out transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. 

“How much do you think the cancel culture, woke debate, is now beginning to really damage the Democrats? And I’ll give you the example that’s been raging recently, this whole issue of transgender athletes in sport, for example. Women’s sport. Lia Thomas, the swimmer. I think it’s grotesquely unfair,” Morgan said.

“It is,” Trump agreed.

“You can support trans rights to equality and fairness, but also understand that what’s going on in sport is inherently unfair and unjust and unequal. Is that your position?” Morgan added.

“People see it and they won’t put up with it,” Trump responded. “They had a weight lifter where the record was, for 11 or 12 years, and they’d put a half-an-ounce on each side, the woman would lift – a guy comes along and breaks the record by numbers you would never –”

“Boris Johnson came out recently and said that he would ban biological males, people born with biological male bodies who transition – he would ban them from then competing in women’s sport,” Morgan said.

“Good.” 

“Do you agree with that?”

“I do. I do. I agreed with that long before anybody else,” Trump said. “I think it’s ridiculous and it’s sad and it’s bad for the Democrats because they’re not going to do that.”

Trump then slammed biological male swimmer Will “Lia” Thomas, who competed against women for the University of Pennsylvania and recently won first place in the NCAA women’s championships, as Rebecca covered.

“A woman is somebody that swims at a certain time and doesn’t get beaten by 38 seconds by somebody that wasn’t even a good swimmer as a male,” he said.

In the same interview, Trump slammed Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, saying that Queen Elizabeth II should revoke their royal titles, as Townhall covered. To recap, in 2021, Harry and Markle left their royal duties and moved to California and sat down with Oprah in an explosive interview where they discussed the British royal family. 

Weeks later, the couple made headlines weeks later when Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, passed away at age 99. Markle did not attend his funeral.

“I’m not a fan of Meghan. I’m not a fan. And I wasn’t right from the beginning,” Trump told Morgan. “I think poor Harry is being led around by his nose.”

Trump added that he predicts Harry and Markle’s marriage will end “bad” and told Morgan that he disagrees with the Queen for not removing their titles.

“If you were the Queen, is it of the stage now, would you remove their royal titles?” Morgan pressed. 

“I would,” Trump said. “The only thing I disagree with the Queen on, probably one of the only things ever, is that I think she should have said ‘if that’s your choice, fine, but you no longer have titles. You no longer have – and frankly, don’t come around,’” Trump said. He added that Harry has been “disrespectful” and an “embarrassment” to the country.

Source: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2022/05/01/trump-transgender-athletes-n2606492

INVASION OF YOUR GOD GIVEN FREE WILL! HACKED BY EVIL! 9 APRIL 2022 [Rumble Video]

God Says Ministries the House of Fire is a one man ministry and was founded in 2009, when I had a radical experience in the Presence of God. Bringing the Prophetic Word in Season and out of Season. God Says Miniseries the House of Fire, is also a Evangelist ministry to the Nations where ever God calls me.
I run in the Office of a Prophet, but I am whatever God wants me to be in the moment of Time. The Prophet, the Evangelist, the Pastor, the Teacher, the Dishwasher, the Woodchopper, a Father to Orphans or the Ear that listens…
……………………………..
Seeds/Donations are between you and God, and the amount is always in the hands of the God of Overflow.
“Pressed Down, Shaken together and Running Over.”
— Read on rumble.com/v10ei43-invasion-of-your-god-given-free-will-hacked-by-evil-9-april-2022.html