On Saturday, Michael Shellenberger tweeted out part four of the Twitter files which revealed that former First Lady Michelle Obama’s pressured Twitter to ban then President Donald Trump on January 7, 2021, a day before Twitter did it. After the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, the outlet created a justification to ban the sitting president.
“Now is the time for Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous behavior—and go even further than they have already by permanently banning this man from their platforms and putting in place policies to prevent their technologies from being used by the nation’s leaders to fuel insurrection,” Obama’s note to Twitter read.
But after the events of Jan 6, the internal and external pressure on Twitter CEO @jack grows.
Former First Lady @michelleobama , tech journalist @karaswisher , @ADL , high-tech VC @ChrisSacca , and many others, publicly call on Twitter to permanently ban Trump. pic.twitter.com/RzNj7WJReg
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 10, 2022
Journalist Kara Swisher and the Anti-Defamation League joined Michelle Obama in calling for Twitter to ban Trump.
In her message to Twitter, Obama falsely claimed that the BLM riots of 2020 were “peaceful protests.”
She wrote, “Seeing the gulf between the responses to yesterday’s riot and this summer’s peaceful protests and the larger movement for racial justice is so painful. It hurts.”
The BLM riots of 2020 caused upwards of 30 deaths, multiple injuries, and over 1 billion dollars in damage.
In October of 2020, Michelle Obama said Trump was racist for pointing out the violence of the BLM riots.
She said, “pinning (violence) on what’s been an overwhelmingly peaceful movement for racial solidarity; it’s true, research backs it up; only a tiny fraction of demonstrations have had any violence at all. So What the president is doing is patently false, morally wrong, and yes, it is racist.”
.@MichelleObama on BLM riots: Trump is “pinning [violence] on what’s been an overwhelmingly peaceful movement for racial solidarity; it’s true, research backs it up; only a tiny fraction of demonstrations have had any violence at all … What the president is doing is … racist.” pic.twitter.com/7wBsmACiCQ
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 6, 2020
A month later she said Trump voters, in the “tens of millions of people voted for the status quo, even when it meant supporting lies, hate, chaos, and division.”
Schellenberger’s Twitter files revealed that former head of Twitter Trust and Safety Yoel Roth created a “strike” system that, when applied to a user, would justify a ban.
Around 11:30 am PT, Roth DMs his colleagues with news that he is excited to share.
“GUESS WHAT,” he writes. “Jack just approved repeat offender for civic integrity.”
The new approach would create a system where five violations ("strikes") would result in permanent suspension. pic.twitter.com/F1KYqd1Xea
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 11, 2022
Saturday’s Twitter files showed Roth proposed that it would take five strikes to warrant the ban but eventually settled on an “ad hoc” reasoning for Trump’s ban. Roth previously wanted to ban Florida Representative Matt Gaetz using similar methods.
"This might be an unpopular opinion but one off ad hoc decisions like this that don’t appear rooted in policy are imho a slippery slope… This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world…" pic.twitter.com/4pedmgY8pa
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 11, 2022
Original Article: https://thepostmillennial.com/michelle-obama-pressured-twitter-to-ban-trump-twitter-files
