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0:55

Breaking news overnight, violence in

0:57

the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. Tear

0:59

gas, Molotov cocktails, and

1:01

gunfire. Protesters

1:03

furious over the police shooting of unarmed

1:06

black teenager Michael Brown. The

1:08

National Guard, the National Guard now

1:10

being deployed to the area. The very

1:12

latest overnight and the new details.

1:14

I was sitting on my couch and I saw

1:17

the protests on CNN. In

1:19

August 2014, DeRay McKesson

1:22

was living in Minneapolis. He was watching coverage

1:24

that didn't make any sense to him. And it

1:26

looked like the wild protesters. It was like, these

1:28

people are

1:29

nuts and they don't care about community and they're

1:31

destroying things. This was another very

1:34

tense night. And police say

1:37

that this was not civil disobedience. This

1:39

was aggression toward police.

1:42

And I remember going on Twitter and Twitter was just telling

1:44

a different story. On Twitter, it was

1:47

the police are trying to kill us. This is crazy. It

1:49

left this Biden street for one and a half hours. Why they kill us unarmed

1:51

kid. And I just remember being

1:54

like,

1:55

it's not me, right? I just remember

1:57

that dissonance. Mckesson

2:00

decided to drive south eight hours to

2:02

Ferguson. Do you think if you

2:04

were not consuming Twitter back then that

2:07

you would have gone anyway? Was

2:09

the coverage on CNN enough to provoke

2:11

that emotion in you or was it the stuff

2:14

you were seeing on Twitter?

2:15

Without Twitter, I wouldn't have gone.

2:17

And when Mckesson got to Ferguson, he stayed

2:19

on Twitter.

2:20

Twitter was like how you knew where to go to volunteer.

2:23

Like, this thing happened or this

2:25

is where the protests will be tomorrow. Twitter

2:27

was- It was useful on the ground for people

2:29

who were there to organize. From day one,

2:31

yeah. Other protesters began looking

2:34

to him for information. So like I was

2:36

like the town crier. I was the person doing

2:38

a lot of the TV interviews, pushing back on the police narrative.

2:41

Very quickly, it was like if I tweeted a

2:43

location and a time, people would come. That was

2:45

sort of my superpower. And your role was

2:47

sort of broadcaster. If you needed a message

2:49

to get out, I was your guy. And people

2:52

just trusted me. So like if I came and tweeted

2:54

it, the news reported as real. People

2:56

would sort of take it as a serious thing. Twitter

2:58

wasn't just an organizing tool.

3:00

Mckesson realized he could use it as a megaphone.

3:03

When I realized that the traditional media was

3:05

not going to be our help at all,

3:08

I was like, okay, this is Twitter is like literally

3:10

the only place where we have a chance.

3:15

People take for granted now that when you think about protests,

3:17

you've seen aerial footage, you've seen all this stuff.

3:19

Remember in the early days, the state of Missouri put

3:21

a no-fire zone over St. Louis. So they

3:23

controlled almost all of the

3:25

narrative, you know, like they were at the mainstream media

3:27

with CNN. Those sort

3:29

of places weren't really pushing back on the police back then. So

3:32

Twitter was like our only mechanism. Mckesson

3:35

wasn't the only one who noticed Twitter's influence

3:38

on the protests. I remember being out on

3:40

West Florida, which was like the main street, the protest one. And

3:42

I saw him in a white t-shirt and I was like, I think that's

3:44

Twitter guy. Twitter

3:47

co-founder Jack Dorsey grew up in St. Louis,

3:49

a few miles south of Ferguson. At the

3:51

time, Dorsey was on Twitter's board, but

3:54

he didn't have an operating role at the company. But

3:56

he was still recognizable

3:58

and it meant something. to have

4:00

a big deal tech founder on the

4:02

ground during a roiling, ongoing

4:04

protest. It was definitely

4:07

unusual. I interviewed Dorsey

4:09

a couple years later at the Code Conference, and

4:11

he told me why he went to Ferguson. Over

4:13

the past nine years, we saw

4:15

so many acts of

4:18

activism and revolution

4:21

and questioning carried

4:23

out through Twitter, but it

4:25

was always somewhere around

4:27

the world. It was never this close

4:30

to home, and I just felt

4:32

I had to be there. I had to bear witness to what was

4:34

happening. The idea that Twitter

4:36

could be used for activism, meaningful activism

4:39

that helped change things, had been around the

4:41

company from the start. We opened

4:43

this season with the story of Iranian protests in 2009

4:45

and the widespread belief that

4:48

Twitter played an important role on the ground

4:50

during those events.

4:52

And in retrospect, that seemed like a stretch.

4:55

But over the next five years, Twitter really

4:57

did play some role in activism around the

4:59

world, and it was definitely important

5:02

in Ferguson. Dorsey

5:06

was proud of the way people were using his invention.

5:09

You can hear it in that clip from Code.

5:12

By the time we did that interview, Dorsey was CEO

5:14

of Twitter again, and he was doubling

5:17

down on this message. He agreed

5:19

to appear at Code on one condition. He

5:21

wanted to bring someone else on stage with

5:23

him. It was DeRay McKesson.

5:26

And Dorsey showed up wearing a t-shirt.

5:28

It had the Twitter logo and the words, Stay

5:31

Woke. In 2009,

5:33

Twitter's leaders had been nervous about taking

5:36

sides, but people within the company

5:38

had always imagined Twitter could be used

5:40

for social good. And now Dorsey

5:43

was explicitly saying that this was the

5:45

company's ambition, to

5:47

be a tool of revolution. The

5:50

idea was, if people have access

5:53

to Twitter, and they can say whatever they want, they'll

5:55

do good things with that power. But

5:58

that idea was about to come. up against

6:01

reality.

6:02

Because at the same time Dorsey and McKesson

6:04

were on stage with me in the spring of 2016, there

6:07

was an entirely different cast of characters

6:10

harnessing Twitter's power to tell a story.

6:13

And their frontman, he crushed it

6:15

on Twitter. You know what? I have millions

6:18

of followers at Real Donald Trump. I

6:21

have millions of followers.

6:28

This is Land of the Giants, a Twitter fantasy.

6:30

I'm Peter Kafka.

6:39

Donald Trump loved Twitter. And

6:42

at one point in Twitter's history, its founders would have been

6:44

delighted to see a president of the United States

6:46

tweeting nonstop. But

6:48

the way Trump used Twitter vexed

6:51

its employees in ways they would have never

6:53

predicted years before. And

6:55

that helped push Twitter to rethink its responsibilities

6:58

and remake itself on the fly.

7:01

We're still dealing with the consequences. To

7:05

find out how Trump dot on Twitter in the first place,

7:07

I asked the reporter who knows him better than

7:10

any other journalist.

7:11

My name is Maggie Haberman. I am a senior political

7:14

correspondent for The New York Times.

7:15

Haberman has covered Trump for years, starting

7:18

back when he was just a New York real estate guy

7:20

with a spotty record. Her biography

7:22

about him is called Confidence Man.

7:24

Haberman says Donald Trump learned about Twitter

7:27

back in 2009 from his

7:29

book publicist. He was promoting one

7:31

of his many books. And so

7:33

for one of the books, the person

7:35

helping him promote it suggested

7:38

to him in a meeting, there's

7:40

this thing called Twitter. And this would be a good

7:43

way to promote your book. The tweets

7:45

were not done by him. Initially,

7:47

they were done by aides, mostly

7:50

by a guy named Justin McConnie.

7:52

Trump was raised on TV and print newspapers

7:55

when he complained to journalists about their coverage.

7:58

He'd scrawl something on their story with a marker. and mail

8:00

it to them. He didn't use a computer.

8:03

But one day, Trump surprised his own team.

8:05

A tweet suddenly showed up on Trump's Twitter

8:08

account and Justin McConnie had not

8:10

done it. And McConnie later described

8:13

to a reporter the moment

8:16

as being like the moment in Jurassic

8:18

Park when the dinosaurs can open the doors.

8:22

Trump locked in right away. He

8:24

was increasingly

8:26

and authentically himself, he

8:29

was savage about people who he

8:31

considered to be his enemies.

8:34

And he was testing it. His assistant

8:37

sent an email to one of his political

8:39

aides making clear that Trump had been testing

8:41

out messages on Twitter and

8:44

looking at what took off and what didn't.

8:46

And he really put a tremendous amount

8:48

of

8:49

work into this Twitter feed. Trump

8:52

started out using Twitter just like anybody else.

8:54

He posted boring stuff about himself. Then

8:57

he figured out that people were more interested in his tweets

8:59

about celebrities like Robert Pattinson and

9:01

Kristen Stewart. Over time, he

9:03

honed it as a political weapon using it to spread

9:05

further conspiracies about Barack Obama.

9:08

He obviously jumped into the swimming

9:10

pool of social media like Hulk jumping

9:13

into the pool, like all the water and everybody else is

9:15

flying out of the pool.

9:18

Ben Smith is the former editor in chief of Buzzfeed

9:20

and the co-founder of Semaphore.

9:22

In the 2010s, Buzzfeed represented the bleeding

9:25

edge of social media driven journalism.

9:27

For Smith,

9:28

Twitter provided an unending supply of

9:30

story ideas, a tip line open to

9:33

everyone on earth.

9:34

At first, I thought Twitter was an incredible

9:36

assignment desk because there was a gap

9:39

between basically the questions

9:42

that were being asked explicitly and lazently

9:44

on Twitter and the capacity of people who were on Twitter

9:46

to get them answered. That was a kind of assignment

9:48

desk where it's like, the assignment

9:50

is here is a question that we don't know the answer to. You

9:53

can take your reporting tools and go answer it.

9:55

As we've mentioned, journalists flock to Twitter right

9:58

away. Reporters would gossip.

9:59

there, they share their scoops there, they praise

10:02

and fight with each other. And even if

10:04

you were a journalist who didn't spend time tweeting,

10:06

you'd still use it to see what other people were

10:08

talking about. And that could affect what you'd

10:10

cover. By the time Trump announced

10:13

his campaign for president in 2015, he had 3 million followers

10:17

and an instant coverage making machine.

10:20

Trump live tweeting the Democratic

10:22

National Convention, posting Bernie

10:25

Sanders totally sold out to crooked

10:27

Hillary Clinton.

10:28

Trump tweeted today. Happy Cinco de Mayo, the

10:30

best taco bowls are made in Trump's Tower Grill. I

10:32

love Hispanics.

10:33

A lot of other people

10:35

were thinking about social media and had like

10:38

social media consultants thinking with them

10:40

about how to optimize engagement on

10:42

social media. He was watching television and tweeting

10:44

at the TV and for

10:46

a while really programming television. He was

10:48

saying, talk about this next, and then they would.

10:51

There was another group watching Trump's every

10:53

tweet. His candidacy lit up

10:55

the very online fringes of the far

10:57

right. They figured they finally had

11:00

a guy who believed what they believed. And

11:02

those folks knew how to work Twitter to

11:04

run influence campaigns. They've

11:07

learned it

11:07

during Gamergate.

11:09

They knew that you could plant news online

11:12

and in small doses, if it gets

11:14

in front of the right people, it can trade

11:16

up the chain to national media.

11:19

That's Joan Donovan, who studies online misinformation

11:22

at Boston University.

11:24

That fact of tricking

11:26

journalists, hoaxing journalists became

11:28

like a drug on

11:31

fortune. It was like a game.

11:33

One big aim of the alt-right trolls was to

11:35

get Trump to retweet their stuff. And

11:38

once he started campaigning for president, sometimes

11:40

he'd do that.

11:42

Trump was very good

11:43

at following certain

11:45

provocative people on

11:47

Twitter and then either replying

11:50

or retweeting them. And so Twitter

11:52

was this amplification mechanism

11:54

that was a bit of a wink and a nod. I

11:57

knew we were in for trouble during the...

12:00

election when Trump had retweeted

12:02

a Pepe meme.

12:04

Pepe the

12:06

Frog is a cartoon frog.

12:08

He didn't start out as an alt-right meme but he

12:10

became one. There's a whole movie about it

12:12

if you really want to go deep. The main

12:15

thing to know about Pepe is that if you didn't know

12:17

what you were looking at, you saw a cartoon

12:19

frog.

12:20

But if you were an alt-right person who liked memes,

12:23

you knew it was a wink and a nod toward you.

12:26

Here's Maggie Haberman again. In a weird

12:28

way, a retweet is almost like a perfectly crafted

12:31

thing for Donald Trump because

12:33

it's a way for him to pass off someone else's thought,

12:35

take some ownership, but have a little distance if he

12:38

wanted to.

12:38

I didn't say that. And he would do

12:40

that. The thing that gets me in trouble is retweets.

12:43

The retweet is really more of

12:45

a killer than the tweets. The tweets I seem to do

12:47

pretty well with.

12:49

This is a way for him

12:50

to own and not own, which is something he really likes

12:52

because he loves avoiding accountability.

12:55

Trump liked avoiding accountability. He

12:58

liked ginning up attention even more. And

13:00

there was a surefire way to do that.

13:02

One of the things that you do is you say something

13:05

that's really transgressive, really sexist

13:07

or sexual or racist

13:09

or just crazy.

13:11

Ben Smith again.

13:12

And all the sort of well-thinking

13:15

establishment media and establishment figures

13:17

wave their fingers at you. And that

13:19

signals to people who feel really alienated

13:21

from that establishment that you actually are an outsider.

13:23

Like if Wolf Blitzer thinks you are

13:26

upsetting, then like you must be doing something

13:28

right. I don't think it was caused by social

13:30

media, but in a moment when these social

13:32

media platforms were optimizing engagement,

13:35

there was this other incentive for these right-wing

13:37

populists to just be as outrageous as they could

13:39

be.

13:40

Trump is the most successful user

13:43

from a politics standpoint of Twitter.

13:46

That's Jason Goldman, an early Twitter executive

13:48

and board member. I think he understood

13:51

intuitively that one of the things that Twitter

13:54

allows you to do is write your own headline, even if

13:56

it's not true, that

13:57

you can just tweet the thing and then that becomes a

13:59

thing the media says.

13:59

Trump says the sky is green. Like, you know, and

14:02

he understood that just because that's how he engages

14:05

in his public life generally.

14:07

He just asserts a reality and allows

14:10

everyone to react to it.

14:11

Goldman has left Twitter years before Trump

14:13

ran for president,

14:15

but he was thinking about the platform a lot because

14:18

during Trump's campaign, Goldman was

14:20

actually serving in the Obama administration as

14:22

the chief digital officer.

14:25

From the time Twitter started, its founders

14:27

had made free expression a bedrock principle.

14:30

Twitter's co-founder, Biz Stone, wrote an early blog

14:32

post calling this out. It was called, The Tweets

14:35

Must Flow. Twitter's

14:37

first leaders believed that the antidote to bad

14:39

speech was more speech. Goldman

14:42

used to think that, too, but now

14:44

he was starting to question Twitter's free speech

14:46

absolutism.

14:48

It felt like it was metastasizing

14:50

into real-world harm in a way that

14:52

was, like, different than what had happened before,

14:54

even pre-Trump.

14:56

Like, Gamergate, Trump,

14:58

Pizzagate, all those things happened

15:00

while I was at the White House. It was this

15:02

notion that now there's just going to be

15:05

real-world, off-the-keyboard violence

15:08

and threats of violence and intimidation and harassment,

15:11

mobilization of hate-based campaigns,

15:15

and none of, like, my assumptions of,

15:17

okay, like, let people work it out online.

15:20

We're really going to hold anymore. Stone's

15:22

boss agreed. Obama himself

15:25

was very aware of these

15:28

developments. He always had, like,

15:30

a appreciative but skeptical

15:33

view of social media

15:35

in particular. Like, I see how this has been

15:37

good, but also it's kind

15:39

of bad, right? Like, there's

15:42

a downside to it. I can see how these tools

15:44

are going to be used to organize

15:46

in ways that are not positive,

15:49

that are not about hope and change, but are about

15:51

violence and hate and intimidation and threats.

15:55

Sometime after the election, but before

15:57

Trump's inauguration, Goldman went

15:59

to a meeting and the Oval Office with

16:01

Obama. And he

16:03

asked me to stay behind and talk to him. Does

16:06

that happen a lot? It happens occasionally. Yeah.

16:09

I think the thing that was unusual about this particular time was he

16:11

was sitting in the chair that the president sits in, which

16:13

is like in front of the fireplace. And I sat in the chair

16:15

where like the Pope sits, like the guest chair,

16:18

which like normally staff doesn't sit in, kind of a

16:20

faux pas on my part.

16:21

And he says, well,

16:24

you know, not thrilled with how

16:26

this election turned out. Like something very kind

16:28

of like low key. And I was like, yeah,

16:31

I'm also not super thrilled

16:33

about it. Like doesn't seem to be great.

16:35

And he's like, and you know, a lot of

16:37

reasons why this happened, but

16:39

in part, it's kind of your

16:41

fault. Coming

16:44

up, Twitter grapples with a very

16:46

tough question. What happens

16:48

when its most powerful super user, who

16:51

also happens to be the most powerful person

16:53

in the world, creates havoc on

16:56

the platform? And

16:58

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Slash Giants.

18:16

Trump was very good at Twitter, but

18:19

that wasn't the only reason he won the presidency.

18:22

Shortly after the 2016 election, a lot

18:24

of people were convinced Trump had gotten serious help

18:27

from Russia. What we're talking

18:30

about is the beginning of cyber

18:32

warfare. You have a huge

18:34

problem on your hands because

18:37

you bear this responsibility. You've

18:39

created these platforms, and

18:42

now they are being misused.

18:44

And you have to be the ones to

18:47

do something about

18:48

it, or we

18:50

will.

18:52

That's Senator Dianne Feinstein in November 2017,

18:55

during a hearing with lawyers from Twitter, Facebook,

18:58

and Google. At the time, there

19:00

had been a flurry of reports about Russia's attempt

19:02

to interfere with the election using social media,

19:05

and the big platforms were starting to provide

19:07

evidence of that campaign. Twitter

19:09

said that in the three months before the election, 36,000

19:12

Russian bots had posted 1.4 million

19:16

election-related tweets. Now

19:19

it's worth saying that since 2017,

19:21

some research and reporting has argued

19:24

pretty convincingly against the idea that

19:26

Russian trickery on social media swayed the

19:28

election. But back then, much

19:30

of Washington and the public felt panicked, and

19:33

Twitter's leadership was rattled too.

19:35

When Twitter was criticized for

19:37

failing to address Russian interference

19:40

in American elections, we

19:42

felt that really deeply.

19:44

Yole Roth managed product trust

19:46

for Twitter at the time.

19:47

I was angry about it. Executives

19:50

were angry about it. I remember having a

19:52

meeting with Jack Dorsey to talk about what

19:54

we should do, and he was upset

19:56

that somebody would violate Twitter in that

19:59

way. That was the abiding

20:01

feeling that it wasn't just about bad PR. It

20:05

was about people rightfully

20:08

being upset with the violation

20:10

of this space. And that as a company,

20:12

we had a responsibility to do something about

20:14

it.

20:15

In 2015, in the aftermath of Gamergate,

20:18

Twitter has started rethinking how to handle

20:20

abuse on its platform.

20:22

It was a recognition that you shouldn't

20:24

put the burden on the victims of

20:26

harmful activity to need to see it, be

20:28

traumatized by it, and then report it. But

20:31

actually, that companies could do some

20:33

of that work themselves.

20:35

So Twitter fundamentally changed how it

20:38

managed the site. It was no longer

20:40

just going to respond to users complaining about bad

20:42

behavior. It would actively go looking

20:44

for bad behavior and root it out.

20:47

The aftermath of the election accelerated the shift.

20:50

The openness of the platform that had felt so

20:52

core to its founders now felt

20:54

more dangerous. And by 2017,

20:58

Jack Dorsey was saying that enforcing the company's

21:00

content policies would be Twitter's top

21:02

priority. The company expanded

21:05

its definition for speech it didn't want on the

21:07

service. It rolled out new policies

21:09

that would suspend users who glorified violence

21:12

against individuals or groups. It

21:14

put sensitive content filters over

21:16

images that denigrated people based on race,

21:19

religion, or gender. It also hired

21:21

a lot more people to work on safety. But

21:24

the company still had the tweets must flow

21:26

in its DNA. So the task

21:28

of the Trust and Safety team became balancing

21:30

two ideas.

21:32

More speech is better for Twitter,

21:34

but some speech is harmful for Twitter users

21:37

and for democracy. Anika

21:39

Kalir-Navaroli joined Twitter's

21:41

Safety Policy team in 2019. She

21:44

was a lawyer and spent years researching

21:46

online speech.

21:47

We were told that we were supposed to balance

21:50

free expression and safety. And

21:53

so many of us were thinking, how does

21:55

societal power play into the fact

21:57

here? While we're making this sort

21:59

of balance. we're inevitably saying

22:01

like we are going to protect

22:04

the free expression of X group

22:07

over the safety of this other group right

22:09

that's an inherent decision that's being made and also

22:11

in the reverse you know when we are limiting free expressions

22:14

right like whose safety are we

22:16

uplifting

22:18

in practice regulating speech at Twitter looked

22:20

like this automated systems

22:22

dealt with the most obvious stuff when

22:24

the automated system wasn't sure questionable

22:27

tweets went to a human content moderator

22:29

and in the really hard cases Navaroli's

22:32

team would get involved

22:34

we tended to evaluate on a good

22:36

day maybe five tweets we were the last

22:39

stop on the content moderation train we

22:41

wrote the rules the Twitter rules things that

22:43

you see externally that say what you can and you can't do my

22:45

team was responsible for updating those for a couple

22:47

of different areas so if

22:49

there was a gray area case or

22:52

if it was coming from a high profile

22:54

user what would are called a VIP a very

22:56

important Twitter

22:57

and it fell within those policy areas

23:00

it landed on my team's desk and

23:02

these are human beings human beings this

23:05

is manual work discussing slacking

23:07

writing what should we do about this this

23:09

is not a computer solving a problem there are no

23:11

computers involved there's a

23:12

lot of people in slack and in Google

23:15

Docs doing a lot of writing

23:17

a lot of what Navaroli did was hold her

23:19

nose and let the bad tweets stay up

23:22

one of my most common refrains

23:24

that I used every single day when you know

23:26

assessing content was saying literally

23:29

quote like I don't love it and

23:31

it was just my way of saying like I wouldn't

23:33

say this I probably wouldn't hang out with somebody

23:35

who said this

23:36

but is it against the rules

23:39

no and

23:40

so in a way it really was a

23:43

couple of people sitting in a room

23:46

trying to like do their best to say like okay

23:48

well what should we do with this the

23:51

final decisions on the hardest cases

23:53

of free speech on the internet self-declared

23:55

global town square were

23:58

left up to a handful of employees

23:59

What you're

24:01

doing every single day

24:03

is

24:03

driving the news cycle. What

24:06

you

24:06

spent doing is what everybody's

24:08

talking about

24:08

the next morning on Twitter. What you're

24:10

doing that day is what's driving the

24:12

conversation. So I thought to myself, like, holy

24:14

shit, no one should have this

24:16

job. Like, this job should not exist. There is

24:19

so much power

24:21

that is in my hands that is happening

24:24

behind closed doors that has no checks

24:26

and balances.

24:27

Navaroli and her team dealt with very

24:29

important tweeters like J.K. Rowling

24:31

and Kanye West.

24:33

But there was one V.I.T. who

24:35

got treated differently. My

24:37

team had access to every single

24:40

account on Twitter except for Donald

24:42

Trump's account. Jack Dorsey

24:45

made the final decision on Donald

24:47

Trump's tweets. Anything

24:50

that involved him, it had to go all the way up

24:52

to the top. You'll

24:56

remember some of President Trump's worst tweets.

24:59

There was the time he suggested his impeachment would

25:01

lead to a civil war. There

25:03

were racist tweets like the one telling

25:05

Democratic representatives and just to be clear

25:08

American citizens, Ilhan Omar,

25:10

Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

25:13

to quote, go back and help fix

25:15

the totally broken and crime infested places

25:17

from which they came. Then there was

25:19

the tweet insulting little rocket man Kim

25:22

Jong-Il in the size of his nuclear

25:24

button. Did Trump's tweets

25:26

set off World War III? Here's

25:29

Joel Roth again.

25:30

Twitter was paralyzed by what to do

25:32

about Donald Trump. Almost

25:35

since the beginning of his candidacy, he

25:37

had been saying things and posting

25:39

things on social media that seemed

25:41

like they violated our rules. But

25:44

there was ambivalence, even from the earliest

25:46

days, about the idea of

25:48

Twitter moderating content

25:50

coming from a candidate

25:53

for president or a sitting president

25:55

of the United States.

25:57

Before Trump, Twitter viewed politicians

25:59

differently from ordinary users. The public

26:01

had a right to know what their leaders were saying, even

26:04

if it violated company policy. And

26:06

during Trump's dissent and its presidency, that

26:08

was the answer they kept coming back to. The

26:10

tweets were too important to

26:12

take down. But Navaroli

26:14

thinks Twitter had another reason for allowing Trump

26:17

extra leeway.

26:18

I very much believed one of the reasons why

26:20

Twitter executives were

26:22

so willing to sort of bend and break their own

26:24

rules and do the things that they did is because

26:27

they very much relished in the power

26:29

of having Donald Trump use Twitter

26:32

as his megaphone. The

26:34

thing that made Twitter relevant

26:36

and made it the hottest thing

26:38

on the town again was its use by

26:41

Donald Trump starting in the 2016 election.

26:44

So even as Twitter stepped up its moderation

26:46

efforts across the platform, it left

26:49

Trump alone.

26:50

And in the meantime, it made a subtle but

26:52

important shift.

26:54

For many years, the company's position on this

26:56

information was that we're not the arbiters of

26:58

truth, that people could have conversations

27:01

on Twitter. Some of them would be true, some of them

27:03

would be false. And eventually,

27:05

through those conversations, the truth wins

27:07

out.

27:08

That's Joel Roth again, explaining why Twitter used

27:10

to be fine with people tweeting things that weren't

27:13

true. But Twitter began to change

27:15

its position in 2019.

27:18

We want to give this president

27:20

the opportunity to

27:22

do something historic

27:25

for our country.

27:27

In May of that year, an altered video

27:29

that made Nancy Pelosi appear drunk

27:32

spread on Twitter and other social platforms.

27:35

The pressure that Twitter faced in the

27:37

aftermath of that incident led

27:39

the company's executives to ask me to

27:41

think about what a policy approach could

27:43

be like to address misinformation.

27:46

Twitter was no longer just concerned about

27:48

people abusing other Twitter users or

27:51

interference from state actors. Now

27:53

it wanted to step in when people were making things

27:55

up. One obvious solution

27:57

would be to take those tweets down. But

28:00

Roth didn't think that would work.

28:02

Because simply removing misinformation

28:04

doesn't cause falsehoods to

28:06

go away, it just causes

28:08

them to move around. We would be playing an endless

28:11

game of whack-a-mole against permutations

28:13

of the same lie. And so we thought,

28:16

look, instead of us just censoring this stuff,

28:18

what if we elevated credible content

28:20

so that people could make up their own minds?

28:23

So Twitter created a policy about

28:26

deepfakes and other altermedia that gave it

28:28

multiple options to deal with intentionally misleading

28:30

stuff. In the worst cases, it might

28:33

actually take the tweets down. It could

28:35

also tweak the algorithms so the tweets were less

28:37

likely to show up on your timeline. But

28:39

its preferred solution was labels.

28:43

If the tweet contained something that was wrong but didn't

28:46

technically break Twitter's policies, the

28:48

site could use a label to add context and

28:50

links to verified sources of information.

28:53

At the time, the deepfake policy seemed

28:56

like an incremental step made in response

28:58

to new threats. When you step back,

29:00

though, it's quite a journey. At

29:02

the beginning of its life, Twitter believed

29:05

its user's tweets were almost always sacrosanct.

29:08

Now it was going to put its thumb on the scale by

29:10

telling everyone that this tweet was wrong.

29:13

And here's something else you should look at instead.

29:17

And in January 2020, we

29:19

were just ready to start

29:22

testing out this feature,

29:24

and then the pandemic happened. And so

29:26

all at once, we're dealing with

29:29

deepfakes and manipulated media. We're

29:31

dealing with COVID-19 misinformation,

29:34

with an untested alpha

29:36

version of a product that we didn't

29:38

really have the ability to roll out at scale.

29:42

But we had a responsibility to do something anyway.

29:45

Twitter ended up using its deepfake rules as a model

29:48

for its new COVID policy, which it rolled out in

29:50

May 2020. And it used

29:52

the same kind of tiered approach. A

29:54

tweet about masks not working might stay

29:57

up with a label. But if you

29:59

told people to drink bleach, that might not.

30:02

Twitter based its decisions on whatever governments

30:04

and health agencies like the Center for Disease

30:06

Control and the World Health Organization recommended.

30:10

That seemed sensible in theory, but

30:12

in practice those recommendations changed

30:14

constantly. Add in the fact

30:16

that one of the major sources for bad information

30:19

about COVID was the President of the

30:21

United States. So what

30:23

started out as a science problem quickly became

30:25

a political debate,

30:27

which made it a whole lot harder for Twitter to

30:29

make calls about

30:30

what was an opinion and what was harmful advice.

30:33

And then

30:35

the 2020 election started heating up.

30:38

As states were starting to go into lockdowns

30:40

early in the pandemic, California

30:42

Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he would

30:44

be mailing ballots to every eligible

30:47

voter in California, a measure that

30:49

a number of other states subsequently adopted.

30:52

And Donald Trump took to Twitter to claim without

30:54

evidence that this would lead to

30:56

rampant voter fraud. And

30:59

that this was going to be the first step towards

31:01

stealing the election from him in 2020.

31:04

This was a big turning point for Twitter.

31:07

After years of leaving Trump alone,

31:10

it stepped in. So Twitter applied

31:12

a label to one of his tweets, and the label

31:15

said, get the facts about mail-in ballots.

31:18

And that was the very first time that

31:20

Twitter took a visible moderation action

31:22

against him.

31:23

And it wasn't the last. Trump

31:26

continued to tweet lies about election fraud and

31:29

COVID, and Twitter kept labeling his tweets

31:31

with corrections. The

31:34

company started to take an even more aggressive stance

31:36

against some ordinary users too,

31:38

which meant that throughout 2020, Twitter

31:41

found itself taking action against a lot

31:43

of conservative and right-wing users. And

31:46

as you would expect, that did not make conservatives

31:48

very happy. Twitter routinely

31:50

found itself in the crosshairs of folks like Tucker

31:53

Carlson.

31:54

By offensive, they mean that the left doesn't

31:56

like it. And that is the new standard,

31:59

and there's only one response. under that

32:01

standard, silence the person who

32:03

disagrees with you.

32:05

That's why censorship is now everywhere.

32:08

That's why the tech companies started censoring the president.

32:10

That's

32:10

why they're getting more and more aggressive in silencing

32:13

you.

32:14

How much were you guys thinking internally

32:17

about what the political reaction would

32:19

be if and then eventually when

32:22

you moderated the president's tweets?

32:25

It was absolutely a factor.

32:26

Since 2017, Twitter executives

32:30

have been somewhat regularly hauled

32:32

in front of Congress, sometimes to get yelled

32:35

at about Russian interference, but then also

32:38

oftentimes in the same hearing to get yelled at

32:40

about being biased against conservatives.

32:42

This narrative, what I would

32:44

argue was a long-running campaign to

32:46

work the ruffs and get Twitter to moderate

32:49

less, was already happening long

32:51

before the 2020 election. And

32:53

so

32:54

when we had to make decisions about whether

32:56

to moderate Donald Trump or anybody

32:59

else, it was with a recognition that

33:01

there could well be a retaliation.

33:03

The

33:04

first time Twitter labeled one of Trump's

33:06

tweets, Yolo Roth found out

33:08

exactly how personal that retaliation

33:11

could be. I

33:12

was, let's

33:13

say, a mid-level employee and

33:15

then all of a sudden I was portrayed as the chief

33:18

architect of censorship at Twitter. My

33:20

photo was on the cover of The New York Post. Kellyanne

33:23

Conway was talking about me on Fox News.

33:26

He's

33:26

the head of integrity and his

33:28

name is Yoel Roth. He's at

33:31

Y-O-Y-O-E-L. Somebody in San Francisco

33:33

will wake him up and tell him he's about to get

33:35

more followers.

33:36

Conway was one of Trump's top aides

33:38

and she was a fixture on Fox News.

33:40

When she called out Roth, it triggered an outpouring

33:43

of personal attacks and threats. And

33:45

the company realized in that

33:47

moment that if we took

33:49

content moderation actions targeting Donald

33:52

Trump or others, that

33:54

that type of retaliation was part

33:56

of what could happen as a result.

33:59

from the safety policy team

34:01

says the threat of retaliation and the fear of

34:03

appearing biased made Twitter pull some of

34:06

its punches.

34:06

The most abuse that was happening in the platform was

34:09

coming from Trump and his supporters. Twitter had

34:11

the ability to sort of tamper that down, but

34:13

decided not to, because the question in the room

34:15

was, well, how are we gonna tell the difference between

34:17

people who are doing abuse and Republicans? And

34:20

there was no answer, because it was one

34:23

in the same.

34:24

Here's Del Harvey, who ran the entire trust

34:27

and safety operation.

34:28

I would say that senior leadership was

34:31

more concerned about

34:34

the narrative that

34:37

Twitter was attacking conservatives.

34:40

And in fact, at times,

34:42

like asked, are we doing

34:44

that? And we're like, are you kidding

34:46

me?

34:47

No, we aren't. If

34:50

you're seeing a discrepancy, it's because they're breaking

34:52

the rules more.

34:54

Never really, really started to worry about the line

34:56

between political speech and real world violence

34:58

during one of the presidential debates that September.

35:00

The moderator, Chris Wallace, asked

35:03

Trump to tell white nationalists and militia

35:05

groups like the Proud Boys to stand down.

35:08

Instead, Trump said, Proud

35:10

Boys, stand back

35:12

and stand by.

35:14

And so there was this sort of correlation between what

35:17

he was saying offline and what he was gonna say on Twitter. And

35:19

so when he said stand back and stand by,

35:22

we ended up having a conversation internally and

35:24

folks are saying, that's too far,

35:27

right? We've drawn a lot of lines,

35:29

and that's one that we're saying he cannot

35:32

say. And what had happened

35:34

along 2020 is that, you know, there was always this

35:36

sort of underlying conversation about

35:38

a violent overthrow of the government.

35:41

And that had started early in 2020 with COVID-19, the

35:44

sort of mask mandates and the sort of deep state

35:46

conversation that was happening. And it was very, very

35:49

fringe, but by the time

35:50

of the presidential debates, it was becoming

35:54

more mainstream. And so what we saw

35:56

people then beginning to say was very

35:58

loudly, you know, I am locked

36:00

and loaded. I am standing back and standing

36:03

by. I am ready for a second

36:05

civil war or another American revolution.

36:09

Things were feeling very high stakes.

36:12

Twitter, still scarred by Russian

36:15

interference in the 2016 election, was

36:17

more worried than ever about its platform

36:19

being abused. But it was also

36:21

worried about being charged with overreaching, which

36:24

is exactly what happened about a month

36:26

before the election. That's when

36:28

the New York Post ran a story about

36:30

Hunter Biden's laptop. The

36:33

Post story included emails that said connected

36:35

Joe Biden to a Ukrainian energy company.

36:38

It also described videos of Hunter Biden

36:40

having sex and doing drugs. The

36:43

Post story set off all kinds of alarms

36:45

for people, including people at Twitter who

36:48

worried about a repeat of the 2016 campaign,

36:51

where Russia seated hacked emails to

36:53

help Trump. Because the Post

36:55

story really looked dubious. The

36:57

laptop had supposedly come from a Delaware

37:00

computer repair guy via Rudy

37:02

Giuliani, who was Trump's lawyer at the time.

37:05

Former Trump advisor C. Bannon was the

37:07

only other source named in the story. Even

37:10

the Post reporter who wrote the story reportedly

37:13

refused to use his byline because he was

37:15

concerned about the story's credibility. Facebook

37:18

initially slowed distribution of the story to

37:21

give time for fact checkers to confirm

37:23

it. Twitter went further. It

37:25

prohibited users from sharing links to the

37:27

story. And in some cases punished

37:29

users who had tweeted links to it. It

37:32

initially said the story violated its hacked

37:34

materials policy. Two

37:37

days later, Jack Dorsey reversed the

37:39

Biden laptop decision. In

37:42

a 2022 interview, Yolroff

37:44

told Kara Swisher that the company's overreaction

37:47

was understandable, but

37:49

still an overreaction.

37:51

Look, when you're weeks out from

37:53

an election, when you've seen what happened in 2016 and

37:56

you've seen the immense political and

37:58

regulatory pressure to focus on.

37:59

on election integrity to address

38:02

malign interference. And when you feel

38:04

a responsibility to protect the integrity

38:06

of the conversations on a platform from

38:09

foreign governments expending their resources

38:11

to interfere in an election, there were

38:13

lots of reasons why the entire industry

38:15

was on alert and was nervous. But a mistake.

38:18

For me, even with all of those factors,

38:21

it didn't get there for me. But so it was a mistake.

38:23

In my opinion, yes.

38:25

The origin story of Hunter Biden's laptop

38:27

certainly seemed suspect at the time. But

38:30

we've never seen evidence that it was a

38:32

repeat of the Russian interference from 2016. Meanwhile,

38:36

the contents of Biden's laptop have

38:38

remained a story for years. Twitter's

38:41

decision to block the story caused immediate

38:43

blowback. Senator Ted Cruz

38:46

hammered Dorsey during a video conference hearing

38:48

just before the election.

38:50

So Mr. Dorsey, your ability is you

38:52

have the power to force a media

38:54

outlet. Let's be clear. The New York Post

38:56

isn't just some random guy tweeting.

38:59

The New York Post has the fourth highest circulation

39:02

of any newspaper in America. The New York Post is 200

39:04

years old. The New York Post was

39:06

founded by Alexander Hamilton. And

39:08

your position is that

39:10

you can sit in Silicon Valley

39:12

in demand of the media,

39:15

that you can tell them what stories they can

39:17

publish, or you could tell the American people what

39:19

reporting they can hear. Is that right?

39:21

No. You know, every person,

39:24

every account,

39:25

every organization that signs up

39:27

to Twitter

39:28

agrees to a terms of service. A terms

39:30

of service is- So media outlets plus genuflect

39:33

and a Bayard dictates if they

39:35

wish to be able to communicate

39:37

with readers. Is that right? No,

39:39

not at all. We recognize and err in

39:41

this policy and specifically the enforcement. The

39:44

way Twitter fumbled the post story was a godsend

39:47

for conservatives who claimed big tech was biased

39:49

against them.

39:50

Here was proof.

39:52

But it was also a problem for anyone worried that

39:54

tech companies had so much power they

39:56

become de facto governments.

39:59

Cutting off access to-

39:59

Information is one of the most powerful tools a

40:02

government has. And here it was Jack

40:04

Dorsey and his team censoring a story.

40:06

After

40:09

the election was over, Twitter drew down

40:11

the number of moderators working on election misinformation.

40:14

Twitter's leaders figured the danger had passed. They

40:17

were wrong.

40:18

They're trying to steal an election. They're

40:20

trying to rig an election.

40:22

And we can't let that happen. In

40:24

the days after the election, protesters

40:27

descended on election offices. Through

40:29

November and December, lawyers for

40:31

the Trump campaign filed dozens of suits

40:33

all over the country alleging fraud. Trump

40:37

true believers coalesced around hashtags

40:39

like stop the steal or locked

40:41

and loaded. But inside Twitter's

40:43

trust and safety team, there was disagreement

40:45

about how seriously they should take those

40:47

tweets. Navaroli wanted Twitter

40:50

to take down tweets with the hashtag locked

40:52

and loaded because she thought they were calling

40:54

for violence. Del Harvey saw

40:56

it differently. There were

40:58

definitely calls for us to, you know, just suspend

41:00

every account that's tweeting locked and loaded.

41:03

And we took samples and looked at them.

41:06

And, you know, accounts would be like, locked and loaded

41:08

with my glass of bourbon to watch tonight's

41:11

episode of CSI. So

41:14

what if we instead take accounts

41:16

where they're in a network

41:18

where it's more likely to be higher risk,

41:20

maybe because they're tied to more suspended accounts

41:23

or they have previous violations. Any

41:25

of those prioritize getting

41:27

those reviewed by humans and actioned

41:30

and then lowering visibility for

41:32

other tweets to try to make sure that we

41:34

aren't fanning the flames

41:35

further.

41:38

On December 19th,

41:40

Trump sent a tweet that raised the level

41:42

of alarm inside Twitter. Quote,

41:44

big protest in DC on January

41:46

6th, be there, we'll be

41:48

wild.

41:50

People are ready to overthrow the government

41:52

in some sort of violent way. And Donald Trump

41:54

tweets like, how about January

41:57

6th at the United States Capitol

42:00

Washington, D.C.

42:01

Not everyone thought Trump was using that tweet

42:03

to organize a riot. New

42:06

York Times reporter Maggie Haberman thought Trump

42:08

was just organizing another rally.

42:10

I read it as him calling his

42:12

supporters to come to Washington the day of the

42:14

certification of the Electoral

42:16

College. Have you changed your view

42:19

of what that tweet meant and what he

42:21

thought he was doing there in retrospect? No,

42:23

I never. That's what I

42:24

thought then. That's what I think

42:25

now. I

42:26

think he was trying to summon his supporters

42:28

as a show of force.

42:30

To Navaroli, though, Trump's motivation

42:32

was less important than the way his followers interpreted

42:35

the tweet.

42:36

What I saw happening was the same individuals

42:39

who had been so ready and willing to commit violence

42:41

were then saying, perfect,

42:44

right? Now we have a time, a day,

42:46

and a place in which we are going to do

42:49

this thing.

42:52

So I don't sleep the night

42:55

of January 5th. January 6th, I'm

42:57

up and I'm pacing the floor

43:00

of my apartment. I've been saying this for months. I've

43:02

been telling anybody who would listen something bad is

43:04

going to happen today. Food's house!

43:10

I was actually watching it live on

43:12

Twitter, right? And so I

43:14

was watching people

43:16

just live tweet the event. And it was very clearly

43:19

playing out in real time with

43:20

the text and audio,

43:23

right? And so I knew, like,

43:24

the Capitol had been breached. People

43:27

were saying, like, you know, here's

43:29

a

43:32

picture of where the Capitol has been breached. We

43:34

should go through here. The riot triggered

43:36

panic inside Twitter's trust and safety

43:38

team. Navaroli says she got

43:40

new marching orders. The day of January

43:43

6th, I am told two things

43:46

that I am supposed to do. One

43:48

is to find a reason and

43:51

a way to permanently suspend Donald Trump. And

43:54

two, to make the insurrection

43:56

stop.

43:56

Navaroli says her bosses gave her the leeway

43:59

she'd been asking for. for months to

44:01

take direct action to ban accounts

44:03

and take down tweets in real time.

44:05

So this is the time where people are

44:08

literally calling for the vice president

44:10

to be assassinated. And so, you

44:13

know, I'm

44:13

jumping on Twitter and taking down these tweets live.

44:15

Just manually? Nothing technologically

44:18

advanced. Twitter, dot com, search,

44:21

hashtag execute Mike Pence. I

44:23

felt like I was like a Capitol security guard,

44:25

but I was like digitally watching over the

44:28

building. And

44:33

I remember at the end of the day, there was

44:35

this video that went around of these

44:38

folks who worked at the Capitol sweeping

44:40

up the glass, right? And sort of all of the

44:42

damage that had happened. And I just

44:45

resonated so deeply with that

44:47

because it felt like that was my job.

44:50

After Trump tweeted his support for the rioters,

44:53

Twitter suspended his account for 12 hours.

44:56

Then two days after

44:58

the riots, he tweeted, quote, to

45:00

all those who have asked, I will not

45:03

be going to the inauguration on January

45:05

20th.

45:06

And what we actually saw happening was people

45:08

beginning to plan for a second insurrection.

45:12

So many folks were saying like, oh, I didn't get

45:14

to

45:14

participate the first time, right? Like I didn't make

45:16

it, you know, on January 6th to the Capitol.

45:19

But the thing that was being planned was not just

45:22

for the United States Capitol, but for capitals

45:24

all over the country.

45:26

Trump spent years tweeting the most

45:28

outrageous stuff. In the end,

45:30

the one that got him in the most trouble was

45:33

about him not going to an event.

45:36

That tweet about not attending

45:38

the inauguration and the

45:40

very clear,

45:42

immediate

45:44

groundswell of response where people

45:46

started talking

45:47

about inauguration that is being a target

45:51

made it really clear that we needed

45:53

to take action at this point. Jack

45:55

Dorsey was on vacation in French

45:57

Polynesia. So Twitter's general

45:59

counsel. Vijay Gade reportedly

46:02

made the final call to permanently suspend

46:04

Trump.

46:06

There was blowback both ways.

46:08

We should have done it sooner. We should have done

46:10

it a different way. We should have never done

46:12

it in the first place. And

46:14

it's still the best decision that we made at

46:16

the time with the information we had.

46:18

I asked Maggie Haberman how Trump reacted

46:21

to getting banned from Twitter.

46:23

Very very very angry.

46:25

He was very angry.

46:26

Again, talking about his recognition of the

46:28

power of that tool, he knew what

46:30

was being taken away from him. He cares

46:33

about being Donald Trump.

46:35

Being president fed the brand, augmented

46:37

the brand, but the brand was him.

46:39

Navaroli ended up giving testimony to

46:41

the House committee investigating January 6th. She

46:45

said that Twitter bore some of the responsibility

46:47

for the insurrection. She told the committee

46:49

that Twitter should have done more to tamp down

46:52

on calls for violence.

46:53

Everybody thinks that their platform

46:56

is so special and so unique and they do

46:58

something so different that they're not going to

47:00

have the same problems that Facebook had, right?

47:02

Like Facebook was the one where everybody meddled in the

47:04

elections and where all the bad stuff happened. And

47:06

I think Twitter thought that, right? And here

47:09

I am saying like, yeah, you can give the 2016

47:11

election to Facebook, but like the 2020 election

47:14

belonged to Twitter.

47:16

My colleague Lauren Good asked Del

47:18

Harvey whether she thought there was anything Twitter

47:21

should have done differently.

47:22

I don't know that there was much else we could have

47:24

done differently. I think that in general,

47:27

in a perfect world, there would have been

47:29

more that we could do, but

47:31

we don't live in a perfect world. And also

47:34

this was a physical attack happening

47:37

in Washington, D.C. Like

47:39

we weren't there. We

47:42

were doing our thing to try to keep the internet

47:44

safe. What

47:45

do you think Twitter learned from

47:48

the company? Well,

47:52

I think most of the people who would have had learnings

47:55

from it are gone now.

47:57

So I don't know that

47:58

there is much left.

48:02

Just about all the people who

48:05

worked for Del Harvey left after Elon

48:07

Musk bought the company a year ago, which

48:10

is not an accident. Musk

48:12

had made it clear that when he bought Twitter, one

48:15

of the things he wanted to do was reverse

48:17

what he saw as Twitter's overreach. Musk

48:20

promised to bring back accounts that had been banned

48:22

under Twitter's increasingly strict moderation

48:24

policies. One account

48:27

in particular.

48:28

It was not correct to

48:32

ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake.

48:34

I think it was a morally bad decision. To

48:37

be clear. And

48:39

foolish in the extreme.

48:42

In the next and final episode of

48:44

Land of the Giants, the Twitter fantasy, Elon

48:47

Musk buys Twitter and then

48:50

regrets it.

48:51

What about the rest of us? Audio

48:59

clips from CNN, Megyn Kelly presents

49:01

ABC News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, The

49:03

Knight Foundation, Fox News, and The Financial

49:05

Times. Additional footage provided

49:07

by Getty Images.

49:09

Land of the Giants, the Twitter fantasy, is

49:11

a production of Vox and the Vox Media Podcast

49:14

Network. Matt Frasica

49:16

is our lead producer. Oluwakemi,

49:18

Alade Sui is our producer. Megan

49:20

Kunein is our editor. Charlotte Silver

49:23

is our fact checker. Brandon McFarland

49:25

composed the show's theme and engineered this episode.

49:29

Art Shung is our showrunner. Nishak Kerwa

49:31

is our executive producer. I'm Peter

49:33

Kofka. If you like this episode, as

49:35

always, please share it. And you can follow

49:38

the show by clicking the plus

49:39

sign in your podcast app.

49:52

Thanks for

49:54

watching.

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