OAKLAND, Calif. — Jack Dorsey was up late Thursday at his residence in San Francisco speaking on-line along with his executives when their dialog w
OAKLAND, Calif. — Jack Dorsey was up late Thursday at his residence in San Francisco speaking on-line along with his executives when their dialog was interrupted: President Trump had simply posted one other inflammatory message on Twitter.
Tensions between Twitter, the place Mr. Dorsey is chief govt, and Mr. Trump had been working excessive for days over the president’s aggressive tweets and the corporate’s resolution to start labeling a few of them. In his newest message, Mr. Trump weighed in on the clashes between the police and protesters in Minneapolis, saying, “when the looting begins, the taking pictures begins.”
A gaggle of greater than 10 Twitter officers, together with legal professionals and policymakers, shortly gathered nearly to evaluation Mr. Trump’s publish and debate over the messaging system Slack and Google Docs whether or not it pushed individuals towards violence.
They quickly got here to a conclusion. And after midnight, Mr. Dorsey gave his go-ahead: Twitter would hide Mr. Trump’s tweet behind a warning label that said the message violated its policy against glorifying violence. It was the first time Twitter applied that specific warning to any public figure’s tweets.
The action has prompted a broad fight over whether and how social media companies should be held responsible for what appears on their sites, and was the culmination of months of debate inside Twitter. For more than a year, the company had been building an infrastructure to limit the impact of objectionable messages from world leaders, creating rules on what would and would not be allowed and designing a plan for when Mr. Trump inevitably broke them.
But the path to that point was not smooth. Inside Twitter, dealing with Mr. Trump’s tweets — which are the equivalent of a presidential megaphone — was a fitful and uneven process. Some executives repeatedly urged Mr. Dorsey to take action on the inflammatory posts while others insisted he hold back, staying hands-off as the company had done for years.
Outside Twitter, the president’s critics urged the company to shut him down as he pushed the limits with insults and untruths, noting ordinary users were sometimes suspended for lesser transgressions. But Twitter argued that posts by Mr. Trump and other world leaders deserved special leeway because of their news value.
The efforts were complicated by Mr. Dorsey, 43, who was sometimes absent on travels and meditative retreats before the coronavirus pandemic. He often delegated policy decisions, watching the debate from the sidelines so he would not dominate with his own views. And he frequently did not weigh in until the last minute.
Now Twitter is at war with Mr. Trump over its treatment of his posts, which has implications for the future of speech on social media. In the past week, the company for the first time added fact-checking and other warning labels to three of Mr. Trump’s messages, refuting their accuracy or marking them as inappropriate.
In response, an irate Mr. Trump issued an executive order designed to limit legal protections that tech companies enjoy and posted more angry messages.
Twitter’s position is precarious. The company is grappling with charges of bias from the right over its labeling of Mr. Trump’s tweets; one of its executives has faced a sustained campaign of online harassment. Yet Twitter’s critics on the left said that by leaving Mr. Trump’s tweets up and not banning him from the site, it was enabling the president.
“It really is about whether or not Twitter blinks,” said James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell University. “You really have to stick to your guns and ensure you do it right.”
Twitter is girding for a protracted battle with Mr. Trump. Some employees have locked down their social media accounts and deleted their professional affiliation to avoid being harassed. Executives, holed up at home, are meeting virtually to discuss next steps while also handling a surge of misinformation related to the pandemic.
This account of how Twitter came to take action on Mr. Trump’s tweets was based on interviews with nine current and former company employees and others who work with Mr. Dorsey outside of Twitter. They declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly and because they feared being targeted by Mr. Trump’s supporters.
A Twitter spokesman declined to comment. Mr. Dorsey tweeted on Friday that the fact-checking process should be open to the public so that the facts are “verifiable by everyone.”
Mr. Trump said on Twitter that his recent statements were “very simple” and that “nobody should have any problem with this other than the haters, and those looking to cause trouble on social media.” The White House declined to comment.
The confrontation between Mr. Trump and Twitter has raised questions about free speech. Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, social media companies are shielded from most liability for the content posted on their platforms. Republican lawmakers have argued the companies are acting as publishers and not mere distributors of content and should be stripped of those protections.
But a hands-off approach by the companies has allowed harassment and abuse to proliferate online, said Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University and a First Amendment scholar. So now the companies, he said, have to grapple with how to moderate content and take more responsibility, without losing their legal protections.
“These platforms have achieved incredible power and influence,” Mr. Bollinger said, adding that moderation was a necessary response. “There’s a greater risk to American democracy in allowing unbridled speech on these private platforms.”
For years, Twitter did not touch Mr. Trump’s messages. But as he continued using Twitter to deride rivals and spread falsehoods, the company faced mounting criticism.
That set off internal debates. Mr. Dorsey observed the discussions, sometimes raising questions about who could be harmed by posts on Twitter or its moderation decisions, executives said.
In 2018, two of the president’s tweets stood out to Twitter officials. In one, Mr. Trump discussed launching nuclear weapons at North Korea, which some staff believed violated firm coverage in opposition to violent threats. Within the different, he referred to as a former aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman, “a crazed, crying lowlife” and “that canine.”
On the time, Twitter had guidelines in opposition to harassing messages just like the tweet about Ms. Manigault Newman, however left the tweet up.
The corporate started engaged on a particular resolution to permit it to reply to violent and inaccurate posts from Mr. Trump and different world leaders with out eradicating the messages. Mr. Dorsey had expressed curiosity to find a center floor, executives stated. It additionally rolled out labels to indicate {that a} tweet wanted fact-checking or had movies and images that had been altered to be deceptive.
The trouble was overseen by Vijaya Gadde, who leads Twitter’s authorized, coverage, belief and security groups. The labels for world leaders, unveiled final June, defined how a politician’s message had damaged a Twitter coverage and took away instruments that would amplify it, like retweets and likes.
“We need to elevate wholesome conversations on Twitter and that will generally imply providing context,” Del Harvey, Twitter’s vp of belief and security, stated in an interview this 12 months.
By the point the labels had been launched, Mr. Trump was not the one head of state testing Twitter’s boundaries. Shortly earlier than Twitter launched them, the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, tweeted a sexually specific video and the Iranian chief Ali Khamenei posted threatening remarks about Israel.
Final month, Twitter used the labels on a tweet from the Brazilian politician Osmar Terra through which he falsely claimed that quarantine elevated instances of the coronavirus.
“This Tweet violated the Twitter Guidelines,” the label learn. “Nevertheless, Twitter has decided that it might be within the public’s curiosity for the Tweet to stay accessible.”
On Tuesday, Twitter officers started discussing labeling Mr. Trump’s messages after he falsely asserted that mail-in ballots had been illegally printed and implied they’d result in fraud within the November election. His tweets had been flagged to Twitter by a portal it had opened particularly for nonprofit teams and native officers concerned in election integrity to report content material that would discourage or intervene with voting.
Twitter shortly concluded that Mr. Trump had posted false details about mail-in ballots. The corporate then labeled two of his tweets, urging individuals to “get the details” about voting by mail. An in-house staff of truth checkers additionally assembled an inventory of what individuals ought to learn about mail-in ballots.
Mr. Trump struck again, drafting an govt order designed to chip away at Part 230. He and his allies additionally singled out a Twitter worker who had publicly criticized him and different Republicans, falsely suggesting that worker was accountable for the labels.
Mr. Dorsey and his executives stored on alert. On Wednesday, Twitter labeled hundreds of other tweets, including those that falsely claimed to include images of Derek Chauvin, the white police officer who was charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd, an African-American man in Minnesota.
Mr. Trump did not let up. Even after Twitter called out his shooting tweet for glorifying violence, he posted the identical sentiment once more.
“Looting results in taking pictures,” Mr. Trump wrote, including that he didn’t need violence to happen. “It was spoken as a truth.”
This time, Twitter didn’t label the tweet.