The Twitter Files now being revealed under new owner Elon Musk’s supervision show that a cabal of woke fanatics drunk on censorship ran the internet’s town square while its founder, Jack Dorsey, was oblivious, Ben Shapiro said Monday.
Speaking on his popular podcast and radio show, Shapiro said the evidence being rolled out by Musk’s handpicked investigators, journalists Mat Taibbi and Bari Weiss, and author Michael Shellenberger, paint a devastating behind-the-scenes picture of how decisions were made at the platform. The silencing of a 2020 election bombshell, routine muzzling of conservatives, and the outright banning of former President Trump were all carried out by a handful of leftist loons, Shapiro said.
“They were deciding who should stay and who should go, using their own political predilections to decide what sort of material was worthy of being seen,” Shapiro said. “And they set all of these preconditions in spite of the fact that they knew that there was no actual hardcore policy that was being defined by Twitter.”
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Taibbi wrapped up the initial drop of Twitter internal communications with a note about how Twitter’s content cops, led by Global Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth, set up a dizzying array of rules for suspensions and bans of Twitter users that were supposed to apply to any case that might arise. But while they took the most expansive view possible for liberals, who were rarely sanctioned, the small team worked backwards with made-up rules to ban conservatives in a corrupt process that peaked during the January 6 riots.
Or, as Shapiro put it: “They knew that there was no actual standard that was being set by Twitter. Instead, they just basically decided, ‘Here’s the thing I don’t like. How do I cram this square peg into the round hole of Twitter policy?’”
This is how Yoel Roth ended up as a more important person in defining Twitter policy than their security heads.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) December 12, 2022
Whether politically motivated censorship is implemented by woke managers or by the top brass makes no difference, Shapiro said. The fault lies with those at the top, and in Twitter’s case, that would be Dorsey.
“Jack Dorsey was an absentee landlord,” Shapiro said. “He basically created the company and then he said he didn’t like running the company and he would run off on vacation and he leaves Yoel Roth, who’s a partisan hack, in charge.”
Roth, who once tweeted that the Trump White House was occupied by Nazis and wrote a graduate degree paper on his experience in gay Grindr hookups, even resisted an admonition from Dorsey to remain consistent in meting out temporary suspensions, according to Shellenberger. He also resisted a warning from a subordinate, who humbly suggested in a Slack message that there was no legitimate basis for banning Trump.
“This might be an unpopular opinion but one-off ad hoc decisions like this that don’t appear rooted in policy are IMHO a slippery slope and reflect an alternatively equally dictatorial problem,” the unidentified employee wrote. “This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world – which seems unsustainable.”
Dorsey has repeatedly insisted that Twitter under his oversight never penalized conservatives due to their beliefs, telling the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2018, “We don’t consider political viewpoints, perspectives or party affiliation in any of our policies or enforcement decisions.”
“Oh, really?” Shapiro said Monday after playing audio of Dorsey’s claim. “Weird, because you do.”
“Now Dorsey, again, had a hands-off approach, so he wasn’t the one who was personally implementing this stuff,” Shapiro said. “But it doesn’t matter. He didn’t have to personally implement the stuff he knew how his company was run.”
“When your entire employee base is left-wing and when they are given extraordinary amounts of discretion in order to determine what can and cannot be seen, what you end up with is what Twitter had,” he added.