The role of Twitter in the January 6 uprising in the USA has once again returned to the agenda. At a hearing Tuesday, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 riot heard testimony from a former Twitter employee who said they were trying to warn others at the company that there would be violence on January 6.
The committee cited a December 19 tweet in which former President Donald Trump promised a “crazy” protest in Washington DC on January 6. The tweet “served as a call to action and in some cases a call to arms” to its supporters, the committee said.
The former Twitter employee said on January 5 that it was clear the protest was going to turn violent, but that “intervention was not forthcoming”. The committee did not reveal the identity of the former employee, whose voice was hidden in the recorded testimony. Representative Jamie Raskin said the former employee was on the team responsible for platform and content moderation policies and worked with the company throughout 2020 and 2021.
“I was begging and trying to raise awareness of the situation by voicing the fact that people would die if we didn’t interfere with what I saw,” the employee said. “But on January 5th, I realized that there would be no intervention.”
The employee also noted that he was considering changing Twitter’s rules in early 2020 after Trump’s comments that he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and hold on” during a presidential debate, but the company eventually stopped doing so.
When asked if another Twitter user could do the same actions as Trump without being suspended, the employee replied “no”, noting that Twitter has benefited from the notoriety of being Trump’s social media platform of choice: “Twitter is the former president’s favorite and most I believe he enjoys the knowledge that this is the service he uses and enjoys having that kind of power in the social media ecosystem.”
Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, VP of Public Policy on Twitter, said the company was “clear” about its role in the events leading up to January 6: “We are clear about our role in the wider information ecosystem in relation to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. and as we continue to examine how we can improve the platform in the future, the fact remains that we are taking unprecedented steps and investing significant resources to prepare for and respond to the threats posed during the 2020 US elections. On January 6, we used the systems we built up until the election to respond to the unprecedented attack in real time, and we are determined to repeat this work to address violent extremism in the United States and globally.”
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