Contrary to the strongly-held position of many Republicans, social media platforms bowed to conservatives – especially then-President Donald Trump – allowing right-wing activists to exploit them in the run-up to the January 6, 2021 insurrection, according to an unpublished report by the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.
The 122-page report, filled with “stunning” details, was never published or released by the Committee, according to The Washington Post which first reported its existence, for fear of offending tech companies and Republicans. Committee members were “reluctant to dig into the roots of domestic extremism taking hold in the Republican Party,” the Post added.
“Some of what investigators uncovered in their interviews with employees of the platforms contradicts Republican claims that tech companies displayed a liberal bias in their moderation decisions — an allegation that has gained new attention recently as Musk has promoted a series of leaked internal communications known as the ‘Twitter Files.’ The transcripts indicate the reverse, with former Twitter employees describing how the company gave Trump special treatment,” The Post reveals.
One former employee told the Committee, “ … Twitter was terrified of the backlash they would get if they followed their own rules and applied them to Donald Trump.”
The Committee’s report appears to be a strong indictment of tech companies and social media platforms, especially 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. The draft report details how most platforms did not take ‘dramatic’ steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the internet.”
As it turned out, Twitter employees raised a red flag in the weeks before the January 6 insurrection, warning the social media giant that was Donald Trump’s primary megaphone needed a “coordinated response plan.”
Anika Collier Navaroli, “one of the longest-tenured members of Twitter’s safety policy team,” and “a few others inside the company had worked to push executives to action long before Jan. 6,” The Post reports she told the Committee.
“In the week after the November 2020 election, she said, they began warning that tweets calling for civil unrest were multiplying. By Dec. 19, she said, Twitter staff had begun warning that discussions of civil unrest had centralized on Jan. 6 — the day that Trump had called his supporters to mass in Washington, saying it ‘will be wild!'”
“When asked by a committee staffer whether Twitter had adopted a ‘war footing,’ having seen the warnings, Collier Navaroli said her U.S. team had fewer than six people, and that ‘everybody was acting as if it was a regular day and nothing was going on.'”
In some ways the situation now is even worse.
“Under new owner Elon Musk, Twitter has laid off most of the team that reviewed tweets for abusive and inaccurate content and restored several prominent accounts that the company banned in the fallout from the Capitol attack, including Trump’s and that of his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn,” The Post reports. “Facebook, too, is considering allowing Trump back on its platform, a decision expected as early as next week.”
Musk has actually aided far-right extremism in at least three ways.
First, he has welcomed numerous previously-banned extremists back onto the platform. Second, the “Twitter verified” program has been opened up to almost anyone willing to pay $8 a month for the previously-coveted “blue check,” which once indicated the account is owned by who it says it is, and that the account owner is someone of political or other status and influence.
In November VICE reported, “Musk has welcomed neo-Nazis back onto the platform, engaged with them on his timeline, and posted multiple tweets that appeal directly to them.”
Musk also banned, at least temporarily, several prominent journalists and researchers. Among those permanently banned is Chad Loder. As The Intercept reported in November, Loder is “an antifascist researcher whose open-source investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot led to the identification and arrest of a masked Proud Boy who attacked police officers.” Earlier this month The Washington Post reported “Loder was banned from Twitter by an order from owner Elon Musk, according to a former employee who saw a screenshot of the notes accompanying the decision.”
The Post also reports on the massive amount of resources spent on the social media aspect of the Committee’s work, despite ultimately deciding to not publish its finding.
“The committee staffers who focused on social media and extremism — known within the committee as ‘Team Purple’ — spent more than a year sifting through tens of thousands of documents from multiple companies, interviewing social media company executives and former staffers, and analyzing thousands of posts. They sent a flurry of subpoenas to social media companies ranging from Facebook to fringe social networks including Gab and the chat platform Discord.”
Justin Hendrix, the editor of Tech Policy Press, notes that in March of 2021, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who served on the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, “published a compendium of social media statements from Republican objectors.”
Tech Policy Press reported on that “nearly 2,000 page document detailing public social media posts from 102 Congressional Republicans between November 3rd, 2020 and January 31st, 2021.”