One such request centered upon an edited GIF of Biden, who was running for the Oval Office at the time, after former President Donald Trump retweeted the image. A staffer had claimed that the post, which showed Biden sticking out his tongue and making faces, violated “manipulated media” policies in an email to former Twitter safety chief Yoel Roth, who responded by saying that the image was “pretty clearly edited” with “humorous intent.”
Roth added that “any reasonable observer” could see through the edited post and said the image did not represent a rules violation. Another Schiff staffer nevertheless insisted on Twitter removing the post, claiming that the edited GIF constituted a “slippery slope concern.” Twitter executives remained firm that they would not take the image down.
The Schiff team also asked Twitter for a sweeping removal of content regarding the lawmaker and his staff, which a Twitter executive said would not be “conceivable.”
Staffers “repeatedly complained about ‘QAnon related activity’ that were often tweets about other matters, like the identity of the Ukraine ‘whistleblower’ or the Steele dossier,” according to Taibbi, who said that Twitter “deamplified” such accounts. “We can internally confirm that a number of the accounts flagged are already included in this deamplification,” one Twitter executive said in an email.
The Schiff team, however, expressed concern that deamplification could “inadvertently impede the ability of law enforcement to search Twitter for potential threats” about Sean Misko, a former staffer on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
The newest release of the Twitter Files comes after a previous
edition showed that Schiff’s office asked executives to ban Paul Sperry, a journalist who had
written about a conversation overheard by his sources regarding how to remove Trump from office. Twitter initially declined the request but later suspended Sperry.