Twitter (known officially since a 2023 rebranding as “X”¹) is a social networking website founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. In 2020, Twitter was the third-most-popular website in the United States, counting over 530 million monthly visits. ² As of 2019, an estimated 22% of Americans had Twitter accounts. ³

Twitter has become a major platform for political communication and coordinating political movements both in the United States and abroad. The company has received criticism from right-wing sources for bias in its content management policies, and from left-wing sources for tolerating allegedly far-right purveyors of misinformation, including former President Donald Trump. ⁴

On January 8, 2021, two days after pro-Trump protestors stormed the United States Capitol building, Twitter permanently banned then-President Trump from the platform. ⁵

In April 2022, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk announced a bid to buy Twitter for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share, in order to bring “free speech around the globe.” ⁶ The company’s board was ready to accept the bid before Musk attempted to renounce the deal in July 2022, with his lawyers stating, “Mr. Musk has sought the data and information necessary to “make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform…Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information.” ⁷ Following a long legal battle, Musk and the Twitter board reengaged on the deal in order to avoid a trial and the two parties accepted the $44 billion buyout in October 2022, with Musk taking over as the CEO of the company as of December 2022. ⁸

Political Activism

International

Twitter has been used to coordinate and promote major protest movements throughout the world. These movements have sometimes been called “Twitter revolutions.” Twitter first played a key role in a major political movement in Moldova in 2009 when more than 10,000 Moldovans organized a major protest against the governing Communist Party in the country after an election demonstrators decried as fraudulent. ⁹

Twitter became prominent in political activism in the early 2010s during a wave of democratic reform movements and revolutions throughout the Middle East and North Africa known as the “Arab Spring.” Twitter served as a crucial coordination platform for young, middle-income and wealthy reformers in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain in particular. Throughout 2011, Arab Spring protestors made more than 2 million tweets per day. ¹⁰

Twitter also played a key role in the 2013 “Euromaidan Revolution” in Ukraine against a Russian-backed government. ¹¹

Critics like The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont have argued that the role of Twitter in the revolutions has been overstated, as evidenced by the relatively low number of Twitter users in the targeted countries and government crackdowns on internet access which greatly restricted Twitter use. ¹²

United States

Occupy Wall Street, a left-wing protest in Manhattan which spawned the wider Occupy movement, originated from a #OccupyWallStreet hashtag on a blog post on July 13, 2011, but quickly spread through Twitter. Hashtags for Occupy protests in other cities emerged soon afterward. By October 2011, one out of every 500 hashtags on Twitter were related to the Occupy movement. ¹³ The trailing off of Occupy-related hashtags by mid-2012 has been used to measure the decline of the Occupy movement overall. ¹⁴

In 2013, the left-of-center Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement launched with a Twitter hashtag. Between July 2013 and March 2016, 13.3 million tweets including #BlackLivesMatter were made. ¹⁵ After the death of George Floyd in May 2020, the hashtag saw a major resurgence, and activists used Twitter to coordinate BLM protests throughout the United States. On June 19, the anniversary of the end of slavery in the United States, thousands of BLM-related tweets appeared on billboards throughout the country. ¹⁶

Speech and Censorship on Twitter

Twitter has become an increasingly important outlet for political speech over the decade, especially with the election of former President Donald Trump, who used Twitter for most of his public communications during his presidency. In numerous interviews and public statements, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has stressed “transparency” when it comes to Twitter’s content policies, though he has admitted to allowing a “more left-leaning bias” at the company. ¹⁷ Yet as Twitter has attempted to balance free speech with content curation, Dorsey has received criticism from both left- and right-wing sources. ¹⁸

Despite being known for taking long absences from work at Twitter, Dorsey has taken an active role in creating and revising the company’s content curation policy. According to Twitter employees, Dorsey regularly intervenes in individual moderation decisions, usually to lessen punishments on those who violate Twitter content policies. After white supremacist Richard Spencer was kicked off Twitter in November 2016, allegedly for maintaining too many accounts, Dorsey ordered the moderation team to permit Spencer to have a single account. Dorsey also initially prevented Twitter from banning conspiracy theorist and talk show host Alex Jones from the platform after he was ousted by YouTube and most other major tech outlets, though Twitter eventually banned Jones as well. ¹⁹

On episode 1258 of the Joe Rogan Podcast (aired March 5, 2019), Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that there is “more of a liberal bias” among Twitter employees and that the company has a “monocultural” slant toward liberal bias which it shares with the rest of Big Tech. ²⁰ In the episode, when confronted by journalist Tim Pool about Twitter’s left-of-center bias in the way it selectively enforces user bans, Dorsey affirmed that Twitter was “going to make it all better” and “everything you said [Pool], you’re so right.” ²¹

Right-Leaning Censorship Complaints

Historically, Dorsey has received most of his criticism from right-wing sources who have claimed that Dorsey and Twitter personnel have a left-of-center bias. In 2018, while Dorsey was testifying before Congress, he was accused of running moderation algorithms which targeted conservative users. Then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions held a meeting with state attorneys to investigate the claims. ²² In June 2020, Federal Communications Comission (FCC) Commissioner Brendan Carr (R) accused Twitter of “weaponizing” the platform for left-wing political goals by censoring conservatives and promoting left-of-center groups. ²³

Some far-right or conservative Twitter users have left the site after an increase in bans on right-wing figures like former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, longtime Donald Trump political advisor Roger Stone, Turning Point USA official Candace Owens, and conservative activist actor James Woods and on extremist figures including white supremacist David Duke and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. ^{24 25}

Left-Leaning De-Platforming Demands

Dorsey has also been criticized by left-of-center sources for not restricting more conservative content on Twitter, particularly that of  former President Trump. In May 2020, #PleasedeletethoseTweets and #TakeTrumpOffTwitter trended on Twitter after President Trump tweeted in support of a conspiracy theory that television host and former U.S. Representative Joe Scarborough murdered a staffer. ²⁶ Dorsey consistently defended the continued existence of the president’s Twitter’s account despite calls from the left to ban him until the Capitol riot in January 2021. In November 2020, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law and Common Cause issued a joint open letter demanding that Twitter ban President Trump’s account for violating the company’s civic-integrity policies. Dorsey refused to comply. ²⁷

Capitol Riot and Trump Ban

On January 6, 2021, a mob of pro-Trump protestors stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to block the confirmation of then-President-elect Joe Biden, leading to the deaths of four protestors and one police officer. Twitter has been criticized for allowing former President Trump to make inflammatory tweets which allegedly inspired the protest and for permitting the protesters to coordinate the event using the platform. ²⁸

On the day of the protest, Twitter suspended President Trump’s account for twelve hours, citing concerns that his tweets counted as incitements to violence. ²⁹ On January 8, President Trump wrote on the platform, “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”³⁰

Soon after, then-President Trump tweeted again, writing “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” ³¹

On the same day, Twitter permanently banned President Trump from its platform. In a public statement, Twitter asserted that Trump’s two tweets violated its “glorification of violence” policy for implicitly condoning the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, stoking further political violence, and signaling for more unrest to occur during President Biden’s inauguration. ³²

QAnon Conspiracy Theory Ban

Over the summer of 2020, Twitter banned 7,000 accounts and restricted 150,000 accounts with connections to QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory network, for spreading misinformation. ³³ On January 12, 2021, Twitter banned 70,000 accounts linked to QAnon due to the movement’s alleged connections to the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. ³⁴

The Twitter Files

See also: The Twitter Files

In late November 2022, Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk announced he would be releasing “The Twitter Files on free speech suppression.” Musk had purchased the social media firm the previous month, with an announced commitment to restore “free speech.” For the Twitter Files, he allowed six independent journalists, many of them with left-leaning backgrounds, access to internal Twitter documents and communications covering a period beginning in 2016 when Twitter began enacting controversial restrictions on user content. Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists selected, wrote that all the Twitter Files reporters had full “editorial control” over what they wrote, and were free to criticize anyone, including Musk. ^{35 36 37}

The Twitter Files showed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. intelligence community, and federal politicians had exerted a growing influence over Twitter content moderation after 2017. ³⁸ Some examples covered from this period included the suppression of an October 2020 New York Post story involving the contents of a computer allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, ³⁹ a request from the Biden administration to suspend the account of journalist Alex Berenson, ⁴⁰ and a request from U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) to suspend the account of journalist Paul Sperry. ⁴¹

Both Berenson and Sperry received permanent suspensions. Sperry’s suspension was rescinded after Elon Musk assumed ownership of Twitter. Berenson sued Twitter and was reinstated prior to Musk’s ownership. ^{42 43 44}

Additional topics covered in Twitter Files releases included a description of the blacklisting and content suppression procedures used by the firm; ^{45 46 47} the history of how then-President Donald Trump received a permanent suspension from Twitter in January 2021; ^{48 49} Twitter’s manipulation and suppression of posts challenging COVID-19 policies; ⁵⁰ disputes between Twitter and federal officials regarding the degree of Russian interference on the platform; ⁵¹ and how the since-discredited Hamilton 68 tracking list developed by the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy became a media and political tool to malign right-of-center American Twitter users as Russian influencers. ⁵²

Leadership

CEO

Elon Musk is the CEO of Twitter as of December 2022, appointed in October 2022 following a $44 billion buyout deal that was approved by the Twitter board. Immediately after his appointment, he fired senior leadership positions including previous CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer (CFO) Ned Segal, chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, and chief custom officer Sarah Personette. ⁵³

Parag Agrawal was the former CEO of Twitter, appointed to the position following Jack Dorsey stepping down in November 2021. Agrawal had previously served as the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Prior to this, Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011 where he worked as a software engineer. ⁵⁴

Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey is the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, stepping down in  Dorsey has said little publicly about his political beliefs, aside from supporting a universal basic income, but he has exclusively donated to Democratic candidates. ⁵⁵ According to Dorsey, conservative employees at Twitter “don’t feel safe to express their opinions.” ^{56 57}

Dorsey made his first political donations in 2010 when he gave $500 to Democratic candidate Tommy Sowers, who lost in the election for Missouri’s 8^th District, and $250 to Democratic candidate Reshma Saujani, who lost in the Democratic primaries in the election for New York’s 14^th Congressional District. ⁵⁸ In 2012, Dorsey gave $2,500 to Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Richard Carmona, who lost in the general election to former U.S. Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ). ⁵⁹

Dorsey made significant candidate contributions during the 2020 election cycle. He repeatedly gave funds to Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, but Yang refunded all of Dorsey’s donations. Dorsey also gave $5,600 to then-U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) during her presidential campaign, maxing out the contributions to both her primary and prospective general election campaigns. Dorsey has stated that he supports Yang’s focus on political solutions to technologically-induced unemployment issues and Rep. Gabbard’s “strong anti-war stance.” Gabbard later asked Dorsey to host a fundraiser for her campaign, but Dorsey declined. ⁶⁰⁶¹

Also in the 2020 cycle, Dorsey gave $5,600 to Governor Jay Inslee (D-WA) for his successful reelection campaign. ⁶²

In June 2020, Dorsey donated $3 million to the newly founded Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a coalition of mayors seeking to establish universal basic incomes in their cities. In December 2020, Dorsey donated $20 million to the organization, and announced his support for a federal “universal basic income” welfare program. ⁶³

Donations

In the 2020 election cycle, Twitter employees donated almost $937,257 to political candidates, with $193,460 going to President Joe Biden, and 98.47% of all donations going to Democrats. ⁶⁴

Lobbying

In 2020, Twitter spent almost $1.2 million on lobbying. Its peak annual expenditures were in 2019, when the company spent almost $1.5 million, a significant portion of which supported the Save the Internet Act, a pro-net neutrality bill which was defeated by the Senate. Lobbying expenditures increased considerably in 2018, when they jumped from $550,000 to $1.1 million. ⁶⁵

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