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A former Twitter employee revealed that Donald Trump and his administration had requested the company remove tweets from Chrissy Teigen bashing him, among others.
On Wednesday (Feb. 8), a House Oversight Committee was convened by the Republican majority to investigate their allegations of censorship by the social media company against the GOP. But when questioned by Democratic members of the committee, the former Twitter employees appearing before the committee confirmed that former President Donald Trump and his White House staff routinely requested tweets to be removed – with one from media personality Chrissy Teigen being highlighted.
Anika Collier Navaroli, a former employee-turned-whistleblower, confirmed that in 2019, the Trump White House contacted Twitter about Teigen’s tweet where she called Trump a “p—-y a— b——h” in response to remarks he made about her and John Legend, her husband. When questioned by Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), she went on to say that they “reached out to ask that this tweet be removed” and that her team had to review if it violated Twitter’s “insults policy.” They ultimately determined it wasn’t a violation, so it remained up.
When questioned again about the Tiegen tweets and Trump’s demands by Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-FL), who quoted the tweet, Navaroli elaborated. “This fell under the policy for abusive behaviors, and we evaluated it under our ‘insults’ policy,” she said. “At that time, up to three insults were allowed. It was our job to determine how many insults were included within that phrase.”
Navaroli had also testified earlier that Twitter actually worked to change its policies on more than one occasion to not take action on tweets from Trump – showing that the company had actually worked to be more favorable to him and other right-wingers. This greatly differed from the GOP’s attempts at claiming they were being “censored” by the platform, and a Rolling Stone article published during the hearing showed that Twitter kept a “database” of GOP requests to censor posts bashing them.
She provided an example under questioning by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in reference to a tweet he made about her and fellow congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley and Rashida Tlaib to “go back” to the “crime-infested places from which they came.” Navaroli testified that her assessment that the tweet violated company policies was overruled by former trust and safety head Del Harvey. “So much for bias against right-wing on Twitter,” Ocasio-Cortez replied.
