Twitter chief Elon Musk revealed on Monday that the account of former United States President Donald Trump was de-platformed in 2021 due to pressure from 'activist employees' even as the former president 'didn’t violate the rules'.
Sharing the fifth installment of the Twitter files, Musk tweeted, "Under pressure from hundreds of activist employees, Twitter deplatforms Trump, a sitting US President, even though they themselves acknowledge that he didn’t violate the rules".
Trump was banned from using the platform on January 8, 2021, two days after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol building and interrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
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Musk cited the thread from independent journalist Bari Weiss, who published the latest installment of the ‘Twitter Files’ offering a glimpse into the deliberations at Twitter about permanently banning Trump in the aftermath of the January 6 violence.
"For years, Twitter had resisted calls both internal and external to ban Trump on the grounds that blocking a world leader from the platform or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information that people should be able to see and debate," Bari Weiss of The Free Press stated at the beginning of her thread on Monday
In one of her tweets, internal conversations of Twitter officials were flagged hinting at the discussion among employees over censoring a world leader on social media.
The Twitter Files was first revealed on December 2 with Matt Taibbi revealing internal efforts to suppress the Hunter Biden story in 2020.
Weiss reported the second installment of the Twitter Files Thursday which revealed the company "blacklisting" or shadowbanning certain tweets and users.