Part five of the Twitter Files dropped Monday afternoon detailing the social media platform's decision to indefinitely ban Donald Trump two days after the January 6 Capitol attack.
The latest installment of the bombshell report reveals that even some employees for the social media giant warned of the dangers of censoring the U.S. president.
It also shows correspondence proving that Twitter employees assigned to evaluate Trump's tweets conclude that the then-president had not violated Twitter policies.
One employee wrote in internal correspondence on January 7, 2021: 'Maybe because I am from China, I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.'
Trump, who was president at the time, was on his final warning from Twitter when he tweeted twice the morning of January 8, 2021.
The first tweet praised the 'great American patriots who voted for me' in a further push that he was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election.
Part Five of the so-called Twitter Files dropped Monday afternoon, detailing the social media giant's decision to indefinitely ban Donald Trump, who was president at the time, from the platform
Internal correspondence revealed through the bombshell report shows that those assigned to evaluate Trump's tweets didn't see proof of incitement
An hour later, Trump tweeted: 'To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.'
Twitter previously argued that they would not remove world leaders from the platform because it would hide important information from the public. They went back on that in January 2021 when Twitter indefinitely banned the account of the President of the United States.
Following the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, Twitter employees organized to demand a ban on Trump's account.
'There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,' one Twitter employee said, according to the internal documents revealed by Twitter Files co-author Bari Weiss.
The Twitter Files are a fantastical report published to the social media site that reveal internal correspondence that led to Trump getting booted from Twitter, as well as the decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story just one month before the 2020 presidential election.
Twitter employees started to more openly question why Trump wasn't already banned after his supporters descended on the U.S. Capitol to protest the results of the election and demanding Congress not certify the win for Joe Biden.
'I am still struggling to understand the decision not to ban Trump altogether, given he is inciting people to violence that has lead (sic) to people being killed,' one employee wrote in internal communications after the site flagged Trump's tweets but did not, at the time, boot him from the platform.
'This is the elephant in the room,' another employee responded.
But Twitter staff assigned to specifically analyze the then-president's tweets concluded Trump had not violated Twitter policies.
'I think we'd have a hard time saying this is incitement,' one staffer wrote on January 8, 2021 – the same day Trump was banned.
Another employee agreed, writing: 'Don't see the incitement angle here.'
Twitter policy official Anika Navaroli wrote: 'I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet.'
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