Twitter Files 2.0? Trump’s White House asked Twitter to take down tweets making fun of him

A former Twitter employee has given new insight into the company’s relations with the White House during the tenure of former President Donald Trump. Anika Navaroli, a former senior member of Twitter’s US Safety Policy, testified before the House Oversight Committee that her team received a request to delete a post mocking the previous president. During a hearing with former Twitter officials over their handling of a 2020 New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop, she highlighted the previously unreported interaction. Republicans on the committee have linked Twitter’s original move to ban links to the story with “censorship,” and the company has been chastised for its dealings with government officials.

Twitter executives verify to the House Oversight Committee that the Trump White House tried to get Twitter to take down tweets from Chrissy Teigen that made fun of Trump. pic.twitter.com/gQU8YWT0kw

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) February 8, 2023

What’s up with Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, and his laptop? The session, headlined “Twitter’s Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Story,” was the first in a series of future slugfests ostensibly looking into “government intervention and social media prejudice.” Republican politicians have long adhered to unfounded assertions that social media corporations regularly suppress conservative perspectives and personalities on their platforms in order to boost Democrats. **Also read: Twitter Files: Left-leaning Vijaya Gadde & Company used moderation tools to suppress Hunter Biden story, gag the Right** That idea got a hearty infusion of adrenaline in October 2020, when Twitter took action to halt the spread of a New York Post story disclosing the contents of a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden, fearing it could have broken the company’s hurriedly drafted regulations regarding hacked files. Republicans think the hard drive contains a trove of lurid, corruption-related papers. Twitter staff reveals Trump’s White House also request tweets to be removed. Navaroli revealed that Twitter had also received at least one request, in 2019, from the Trump White House regarding a tweet they wanted to be removed. The tweet came from Chrissy Teigen, who had called the president a “pussy ass bitch,” in response to comments he had made about her and her husband, John Legend According to Navaroli, someone from the White House “reached out to ask that this tweet be removed” and that her team had to evaluate whether the tweet violated the company’s “insults policy.” She said they ultimately determined the tweet did not, and it remained up. **Also read: Donald Trump says he won't return to Twitter after Elon Musk reinstates his account** Earlier in the hearing, Navaroli disclosed that Twitter has altered its regulations on at least one occasion in order to avoid taking action against a Trump post.   She said that when Trump used the term in relation to New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and other politicians, the firm withdrew internal “moderation advice” that referenced “go back to where you came from” as an example of language that would violate its standards. She said that a higher-ranking official, former trust and safety chief Del Harvey, “overruled” her determination that the message violated Twitter’s guidelines. “Unrestricted free speech, paradoxically, results in less speech” The hearing was not Navaroli’s first appearance before members of Congress. She previously told the committee probing the January 6th hack about her efforts to notify Twitter executives about potential threats. “In order to shield some of the most destructive speech on the site, Twitter leadership bent and breached its own rules,” she said in her opening statement. Throughout the session, former Twitter employees disputed Republican legislators’ assertions that content filtering and safety enforcement were incompatible with free expression.   During his testimony, Twitter’s Former Global Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth, who was reportedly the target of an Elon Musk-fueled conspiracy theory linking him to paedophilia, said that content filtering frequently falls into the grey area of “lawful but horrible."   **Also read: Key Twitter exec leaves after Donald Trump's account gets restored** Roth said that removing such content is critical in order to make Twitter “an appealing product for millions of users." In other situations, former Twitter workers told Congress that the company’s concerns about being perceived as biased towards conservatives were impeding their capacity to take action against hate speech and other damaging information that violated its policies. Other sites, such as Facebook, have seen similar problems with moderators feeling forced to accommodate Republicans in order to avoid conservative criticism. “It is not an option to do nothing. Violence will erupt again if we do nothing,” Navaroli remarked. “Every day, we had to decide if a piece of material was equivalent to shouting fire in a packed theatre." Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.