Social media companies bent their own rules in favour of former president Donald Trump and his supporters in the volatile weeks preceding the 2021 attack on the US Capitol, according to an unpublished staff report from the House’s 6 January committee.
The 122-page “Summary of Investigative Findings”, which was obtained and posted by the Washington Post, analyses testimony from employees and documents received from tech companies including Twitter and Meta. It details how the companies failed to adequately address the calls to violence and election-related conspiracy theories circulating online after the 2020 presidential election.
The leak of the document comes as Facebook’s parent company, Meta, decides whether to allow the former president back on its platforms. Twitter reactivated Trump’s account in November after Elon Musk, the company’s new owner and chief executive,his followers on whether Trump should be reinstated. Trump hasn’t tweeted since his initial suspension after his supporters attacked the US Capitol two years ago.
The report said that Trump’s tweet on 19 December encouraged supporters to come to Washington on 6 January – “Be there, will be wild!” – was a transformative moment across social media, changing the tenor of the conversation online to explicit planning for the event. Plans for violence were telegraphed on both far-right forums and mainstream platforms, which pushed 6 January as a critical day in the Stop the Steal movement, the report said.
Supporters of former Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro that ransacked government buildings on 8 January this year used tech platforms to cast doubt on his loss in last year’s presidential election. “We have long established policies that prohibit hate speech, harmful conspiracies and incitement,” Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, said in an email. “As a direct result of these policies, even before Jan. 6 we terminated thousands of channels, several of which were associated with figures related to the attack, and removed thousands of violative videos, the majority before 100 views.”
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