Twitter Protected Trump and Right-Wing Extremists Before Capitol Attack Out of Fear of Reprisals, Per Leaked Jan 6 Memo

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File

The January 6th Committee’s final report on the U.S. Capitol riot left out a trove of information they gathered on how social media companies allowed right-wing extremism to spread out of fear of blowback from conservatives.

Washington Post obtained a 122-page draft memo of the committee’s investigative findings on how Facebook, Twitter and others knew about the spread of violent rhetoric and extreme conservative commentary ahead of the Capitol riot. These social platforms chose not to act against this content, and the Post’s sources say this was not included in the committee’s report because they were “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.”

From the Post:

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.

The committee’s report wound up focusing on Trump’s culpability for the Capitol siege, but very little on how extremism and misinformation spread among his supporters before that. While Elon Musk has celebrated the “Twitter Files” for their revelations on Twitter’s liberal bias and the de-platforming of Trump, a former Twitter employee counter-argued that the company was very lenient toward the former president and his supporters before the riot.

“Twitter was terrified of the backlash they would get if they followed their own rules and applied them to Donald Trump,” said the employee under the alias of J. Johnson.

Team Purple, the group of committee staffers responsible for analyzing social media content, found that social platforms dragged their feet on curbing incendiary rhetoric, and others bent their rules “to avoid penalizing conservatives out of fear of reprisals.”

More from the Post:

But as the committee’s probe kicked its public phase into high gear, the social media report was repeatedly pared down, eventually to just a handful of pages. While the memo and the evidence it cited informed other parts of the committee’s work, including its public hearings and depositions, it ultimately was not included as a stand-alone chapter or as one of the four appendixes.

In the weeks since the report was released, however, some of that evidence has trickled out as the committee released hundreds of pages of transcripts of interviews with former tech employees and dozens of documents. The transcripts show the companies used relatively primitive technologies and amateurish techniques to watch for dangers and enforce their platforms’ rules. They also show company officials quibbling among themselves over how to apply the rules to possible incitements to violence, even as the riot turned violent.