Internal Twitter documents released by journalists Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse late Saturday showed how executives of the social media platform decided to deviate from a longstanding company policy to permanently ban former President Donald Trump.
Yoel Roth, then-Twitter’s head of trust and safety, told a sales executive in a message on Jan. 7, 2021—one day before Trump’s Twitter account was permanently banned—that the company was “changing our public interest approach” for Trump’s account “in this specific case.”
Roth was referring to Twitter’s longstanding “public-interest exceptions” policy, which allows elected officials to post content even if some content violate Twitter rules….