Joe Scarborough Stunned By Report On Twitter’s ‘Preferential Treatment’ of Trump: ‘Kept Using Twitter to Accuse Me of Murder!’
Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough was stunned and angered by a report showing “preferential treatment” for then-President Donald Trump by Twitter, which allowed Trump to “accuse me of murder” without consequence.
A deep dive by The Washington Post‘s Cat Zakrzewski, Cristiano Lima, and Drew Harwell details the contents of a 122-page memo from the January 6 Committee staff that wasn’t included in their final report and which covered the role of social media companies and platforms in the attack.
On Wednesday morning’s edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Zakrzewski joined Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski to discuss the report, which triggered memories of Trump’s attacks in both Joe and Mika:
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Explain, first of all, what are some of the things that were avoided in the final report?
CAT ZAKRZEWSKI: Well, one of the things that the report focused on was how the tech companies actually gave former President Trump special treatment, especially Twitter. Former employees testified to the committee that he really did not have to play by Twitter’s rules, and they couldn’t even use the internal content moderation tools, that they used to monitor other accounts, to track his tweets. There was also a lot of new detail about just the general lack of preparation within the tech companies for the events of January 6. Former tech employees testified to the committee that they warned senior executives, especially at Facebook and Twitter, that more had to be done to stop coded calls to violence, to stop the Stop the Steal movement. And those actions ultimately weren’t taken.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You know, I’m so glad you brought up the preferential treatment that they gave Donald Trump, because we’ve been hearing, of course, from from the current owner of Twitter and all these other people about how poor Donald Trump was so victimized and and people supporting Donald Trump were victimized, we had to deal with Twitter because Donald Trump kept using Twitter to.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: As a weapon.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Accuse me of murder. And when we talked to them, we said that anybody else in the world saying this would have their accounts taken down, and they had no answer! And it was very clear even then they were giving him preferential treatment and it continued all the way through January the 6th! How significant was that? Twitter’s inability to hold Donald Trump to the same standard they held everybody else to? How important was that to Donald Trump in fomenting this riot?
CAT ZAKRZEWSKI: Well, so the January 6 committee staffers concluded in their report that Donald Trump’s tweet on December 19th, when he said “be there be wild” in reference to January 6 was actually a transformative moment across the Internet. So not only did it rile people up on Twitter, it really had effects on other platforms. For instance, the messaging app Discord. Hours after that tweet went out, had to take down a server where people were discussing bringing firearms to Washington. And so what this report really showed was how these social networks can act as a megaphone for these extreme views and help amplify them.
Watch above via MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
