Surprise – even the January 6th Committee was intimidated by big social media. And big social media was intimidated by the Trump cult. This is outrageous behavior from a powerful social media company like Twitter:
Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals.
They deferred to the Insurrectionist in Chief! But what’s really nuts is that the Jan. 6th Committee didn’t formally publish this social media report, because it shows their investigative findings on the role social media played in the insurrection and planning of it. The Washington Post got a copy of it and you can see the link to the unpublished report on this page below. The evidence shows the larger social media companies routinely amplified and encouraged dangerous extremism, coup planning, and white nationalism on their platforms by allowing as many of those types of posts as people wanted to put out there. Sometimes the tweets had a disclaimer, sometimes they didn’t. Remember that the disclaimers on Twitter didn’t start coming until very late in the game. Here is one example from the unpublished report.
That sounds serious enough to put in a report on the January 6th Insurrection, to me. Yet it was left out of the committee’s formal report. THE WHOLE REPORT is below, and you can download it.
The evidence they collected was written up in a 122-page memo that was circulated among the committee, according to a draft viewed by The Washington Post. But in the end, committee leaders declined to delve into those topics in detail in their final report, reluctant to dig into the roots of domestic extremism taking hold in the Republican Party beyond former president Donald Trump and concerned about the risks of a public battle with powerful tech companies, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the panel’s sensitive deliberations.
This is why Twitter and other social media like Facebook are so vile. They under-censored extremism – they didn’t over-censor. The so-called “Twitter Files” touted by Trump and his cult are just more misdirection; more smoke and mirrors designed to deflect blame for trying to overthrow the government and our election. I haven’t read all of them (or much of them) but I know it’s deflection from what I’ve seen. And keep in mind the pushing of these bogus “Twitter File” reports is being done by the CEO and owner of Twitter itself.
The committee document was unreleased however, in a formal way, presumably because the Jan. 6th Committee is actually afraid of the potential blowback from these right-wing social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, and others. Their evidence overtly reveals that Donald Trump and his extremist MAGA cult following used these social media sites to spread their coup plans. They also used these platforms to spread racism, misogyny, anti-police and anti-government extremism. Facebook did ban Donald Trump, eventually, but Twitter just reinstated him. In so doing, Twitter reinstated a domestic terrorist and seditionist, and there have been many others reinstated since Musk took over.
Jan6SocialMediaDocElon Musk has been busy laying out his “Twitter Files” in series form on his platform, but the real Twitter Files can be seen in this document. You can see from this excerpt that Twitter refused to take necessary action to stop the coup plots from being advertised and planned on their platform. There is much more social media-coup reticence like this in the document. Such a lack of leadership on the part of social media means they are simply irresponsible and should be far more highly regulated. This has nothing to do with “freedom of speech” – which only applies to our rights as suppressed by the government, not by private companies like Twitter.
So much for the Safety Team!
The original WAPO source is here
#SocialMedia #TwitterFiles #Jan6Committee #SocialMediaFindings
