SAN FRANCISCO – Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, was working remotely on a private island in French Polynesia frequented by celebrities who escaped paparazzi when a phone call interrupted him on January 6.
On the line was Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer and security expert, with a real-world update. She said that she and other company executives had decided to temporarily block President Trump’s account to prevent him from posting statements that could cause further violence after a mob broke into the United States Capitol that day.
Dorsey was concerned about the move, said two people with knowledge of the connection. For four years, he resisted the demands of liberals and others for Twitter to close Trump’s account, arguing that the platform was a place where world leaders could speak, even if their opinions were heinous. But he delegated moderation decisions to Mrs. Gadde, 46, and generally postponed it – and he did it again.
Dorsey, 44, did not make his doubts public. The next day, he liked it and shared several tweets asking for caution against Trump’s permanent ban. Then, for the next 36 hours, Twitter moved from suspending Trump’s suspension to ending his account permanently, cutting off the president from a platform he had used to communicate, unfiltered, not just with his 88 million followers, but with the world.
The decision was a punctuation mark in the Trump presidency that immediately drew accusations of political prejudice and a new scrutiny of the technology industry’s power over public speaking. Interviews with a dozen current and former Twitter insiders last week opened a window on how it was done – conducted by a group of Dorsey’s lieutenants who overcame their boss’s reservations, but only after a deadly riot on the Capitol.
After suspending the suspension the next day, Twitter monitored the response to Trump’s tweets over the internet and executives informed Dorsey that Trump’s followers had taken advantage of his latest messages to call for more violence. In a post on the alternative social networking site Parler, members of the Twitter security team saw a Trump fan asking the militias to stop President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. from entering the White House and fighting anyone who tried to stop him. them. The potential for more excitement in the real world, they said, was very high.
Twitter was also under pressure from its employees, who for years agitated to get Trump out of service, as well as from lawmakers, technology investors and others. But while more than 300 employees signed a letter saying that Trump’s account should be stopped, the decision to bar the president was made before the letter was handed over to executives, two people said.
On Wednesday, Dorsey alluded to tensions within Twitter. In a series of 13 tweets, he wrote that he “did not celebrate or feel proud that we had to ban @realDonaldTrump”Because“ a ban is our failure to promote healthy conversation ”.
But Dorsey added: “This was the right decision for Twitter. We face an extraordinary and unsustainable circumstance, which forced us to focus all our actions on public security ”.
Dorsey, Gadde and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Since Trump was barred, many of Dorsey’s concerns about change have materialized. Twitter is involved in a furious debate about the power of technology and the lack of corporate responsibility.
Lawmakers like Congressman Devin Nunes, a California Republican, protested Twitter, while Silicon Valley venture capitalists, First Amendment academics and the American Civil Liberties Union also criticized the company. At the same time, activists around the world have accused Twitter of following a double standard by isolating Trump, but not autocrats elsewhere who use the platform to intimidate opponents.
“This is a phenomenal exercise of power to take the platform away from the president of the United States,” said Evelyn Douek, a professor at Harvard Law School who focuses on online speech. “This should trigger a broader calculation.”
Mr. Trump, who joined Twitter in 2009, was a blessing and a disgrace for the company. His tweets drew attention to Twitter, which at times struggled to attract new users. But his false assertions and online threats also led critics to say that the site allowed him to spread lies and provoke harassment.
Many of the more than 5,400 Twitter employees objected to having Mr. Trump on the platform. In August 2019, shortly after a sniper killed more than 20 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Twitter convened a team meeting to discuss how the sniper, in an online manifesto, echoed many of the views Trump posted on Twitter.
At the meeting, called “Flock Talk”, some officials said Twitter was “an accomplice” in giving Trump a megaphone to “whistle” at his supporters, two participants said. Employees begged executives to make changes before more people were hurt.
Over time, Twitter has become more proactive in political content. In October 2019, Dorsey ended all political ads on the site, saying he feared that these ads would have “significant ramifications that today’s democratic structure may not be prepared to deal with.”
But Dorsey, a supporter of free speech, refused to step down as world leaders because he considered them worthy of publication. Since Twitter announced that year that it would give world leaders more leeway to break its rules, the company has removed its tweets only once: last March, it deleted messages from the presidents of Brazil and Venezuela promoting false cures for coronavirus . Dorsey opposed the removals, said a person with knowledge of his thinking.
Dorsey pushed for an intermediate solution: add labels to tweets from world leaders if the posts violated Twitter policies. In May, when Trump tweeted inaccurate information about the postal vote, Dorsey authorized Twitter to start labeling the president’s messages.
After the November 3 election, Trump tweeted that the piece had been stolen from him. In a few days, Twitter has labeled about 34% of its tweets and retweets, according to a New York Times count.
Then the Capitol storm came.
On January 6, when Congress met to certify the election, Twitter executives celebrated the acquisition of Ueno, a branding and design company. Dorsey, who has always done retreats, traveled to the South Pacific island, said people know of his location.
When Mr. Trump used Twitter to attack Vice President Mike Pence and question the outcome of the election, the company added warnings to its tweets. So when the violence broke out on Capitol Hill, people asked Twitter and Facebook to take Trump completely offline.
This led to virtual discussions between some of Dorsey’s lieutenants. The group included Ms. Gadde, a lawyer who joined Twitter in 2011; Del Harvey, vice president of trust and security; and Yoel Roth, the site’s chief of integrity. Ms. Harvey and Mr. Roth helped to build the company’s responses to spam, harassment and election interference.
Executives decided to suspend Trump because his comments seemed to incite the crowd, people familiar with the discussions said. Gadde then called Dorsey, who didn’t like it, they said.
Mr. Trump was not fully barred. If he deleted several tweets that had fed the crowd, there would be a 12-hour cooling-off period. Then he could post again.
After Twitter blocked Trump’s account, Facebook did the same. Snapchat, Twitch and others also put limits on Mr. Trump.
But Dorsey was not sold under Trump’s permanent ban. He sent an email to employees the next day, saying it was important for the company to remain consistent with its policies, including allowing a user to return after a suspension.
Many workers, fearing that history would not look on them favorably, were dissatisfied. Several invoked IBM’s collaboration with the Nazis, said current officials and former Twitter employees, and initiated a petition to immediately remove Trump’s account.
That same day, Facebook barred Trump at least until the end of his term. But he returned to Twitter that night with a video saying that there would be a peaceful transition of power.
The next morning, however, Mr. Trump was back at work. He tweeted that his base would have a “GIANT VOICE” and that he would not be attending the January 20 inauguration.
The Twitter security team immediately saw Trump fans, who said the president abandoned them, post about more unrest, people with knowledge of the matter said. In a Parler message that the security team analyzed, a user said that anyone who opposed the “American Patriots” as he should leave Washington or risk physical damage during his tenure.
The security team began to prepare an analysis of the tweets and whether they were the basis for kick-starting Trump, people said.
Around noon in San Francisco that day, Dorsey called an employee meeting. Some pressed him about why Mr. Trump was not permanently barred.
Dorsey repeated that Twitter must be consistent with its policies. But he said he drew a line in the sand that the president couldn’t cross or Trump would lose his account privileges, people with knowledge of the event said.
After the meeting, Dorsey and other executives agreed that Trump’s tweets that morning – and the responses they elicited – exceeded that threshold, people said. The official’s letter asking for Trump’s removal was delivered later, they said.
Within hours, Mr. Trump’s account was gone, except for the “Account suspended” label. He tried to tweet from the @POTUS account, which is the official account of the President of the United States, as well as others. But with each step, Twitter frustrated him by downloading the messages.
Some Twitter employees, fearing the ire of Trump supporters, have now defined their Twitter accounts as private and removed their employer’s mentions from online biographies, four people said. Several executives have been assigned to personal security.
Twitter has also extended its crackdown on accounts that promote violence. Over the weekend, he removed more than 70,000 accounts that pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory, which postulates that Mr. Trump is fighting a conspiracy of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
On Wednesday, officials virtually met to discuss the decision to stop Trump, two participants said. Some were grateful for Twitter’s action, while others were eager to leave the Trump era behind. Many were emotional; some wept.
That afternoon, Trump returned to Twitter, this time using the official @WhiteHouse account to share a video saying he condemned the violence – but also denouncing what he called restrictions on freedom of expression. Twitter allowed the video to remain online.
An hour later, Dorsey tweeted his discomfort about removing Trump’s online accounts. This “sets a precedent that I consider dangerous: the power that an individual or company has over a part of the global public conversation,” he wrote.
But he concluded: “Everything we learn at this time will improve our effort and push us to be what we are: a humanity working together.”