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OAKLAND, Calif. — Jack Dorsey was up late Thursday at his home in San Francisco talking online with his executives when their conversation was interrupted: President Trump had just posted another inflammatory on Twitter.

Tensions between Twitter, where Mr. Dorsey is chief executive, and Mr. Trump had been running high for days over the president’s aggressive tweets and the company’s decision to begin labeling some of them. In his latest message, Mr. Trump weighed in on the clashes between the police and protesters in Minneapolis, saying, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

A group of more than 10 Twitter officials, including lawyers and policymakers, quickly gathered virtually to review Mr. Trump’s post and debate over the messaging system Slack and Google Docs whether it pushed people toward violence.

They soon came to a conclusion. And after midnight, Mr. Dorsey gave his go-ahead: Twitter would that said the message violated its policy against glorifying violence. It was the first time Twitter applied that specific warning to any public figure’s tweets.

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The action has prompted a broad fight over whether and how social media companies should be held responsible for what appears on their sites, and was the culmination of months of debate inside Twitter. For more than a year, the company had been building an infrastructure to limit the impact of objectionable messages from world leaders, creating rules on what would and would not be allowed and designing a plan for when Mr. Trump inevitably broke them.

But the path to that point was not smooth. Inside Twitter, dealing with Mr. Trump’s tweets — which are the equivalent of a presidential megaphone — was a fitful and uneven process. Some executives repeatedly urged Mr. Dorsey to take action on the inflammatory posts while others insisted he hold back, staying hands-off as the company had done for years.

Outside Twitter, the president’s critics urged the company to shut him down as he pushed the limits with insults and untruths, noting ordinary users were sometimes suspended for lesser transgressions. But Twitter argued that posts by Mr. Trump and other world leaders deserved special leeway because of their news value.

The efforts were complicated by Mr. Dorsey, 43, who was sometimes and meditative retreats before . He often delegated policy decisions, watching the debate from the sidelines so he would not dominate with his own views. And he frequently did not weigh in until the last minute.

Now Twitter is at war with Mr. Trump over its treatment of his posts, which has implications for the future of speech on social media. In the past week, the company for the first time and other warning labels to three of Mr. Trump’s messages, refuting their accuracy or marking them as inappropriate.

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In response, an irate Mr. Trump designed to limit legal protections that tech companies enjoy and posted more angry messages.

Twitter’s position is precarious. The company is grappling with charges of bias from the right over its labeling of Mr. Trump’s tweets; one of its executives has faced a sustained campaign of online harassment. Yet Twitter’s critics on the left said that by leaving Mr. Trump’s tweets up and not banning him from the site, it was enabling the president.

“It really is about whether or not Twitter blinks,” said James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell University. “You really have to stick to your guns and ensure you do it right.”

Twitter is girding for a protracted battle with Mr. Trump. Some employees have locked down their social media accounts and deleted their professional affiliation to avoid being harassed. Executives, holed up at home, are meeting virtually to discuss next steps while also handling related to the pandemic.

This account of how Twitter came to take action on Mr. Trump’s tweets was based on interviews with nine current and former company employees and others who work with Mr. Dorsey outside of Twitter. They declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly and because they feared being targeted by Mr. Trump’s supporters.

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment. Mr. Dorsey tweeted on Friday that the fact-checking process should be open to the public so that the facts are “verifiable by everyone.”

Mr. Trump said on Twitter that his recent statements were “very simple” and that “nobody should have any problem with this other than the haters, and those looking to cause trouble on social media.” The White House declined to comment.

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The confrontation between Mr. Trump and Twitter has raised questions about free speech. Under , social media companies are shielded from most liability for the content posted on their platforms. Republican lawmakers have argued the companies are acting as publishers and not mere distributors of content and should be stripped of those protections.

But a hands-off approach by the companies has allowed harassment and abuse to proliferate online, said Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University and a First Amendment scholar. So now the companies, he said, have to grapple with how to moderate content and take more responsibility, without losing their legal protections.

“These platforms have achieved incredible power and influence,” Mr. Bollinger said, adding that moderation was a necessary response. “There’s a greater risk to American democracy in allowing unbridled speech on these private platforms.”

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Sign upFor years, Twitter did not touch Mr. Trump’s messages. But as he continued using Twitter to deride rivals and spread falsehoods, the company faced mounting criticism.

That set off internal debates. Mr. Dorsey observed the discussions, sometimes raising questions about who could be harmed by posts on Twitter or its moderation decisions, executives said.

In 2018, two of the president’s tweets stood out to Twitter officials. In one, , which some employees believed violated company policy against violent threats. In the other, he called a former aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman, “a crazed, crying lowlife” and “that dog.”

At the time, Twitter had rules against harassing messages like the tweet about Ms. Manigault Newman, but left the tweet up.

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The company began working on a specific solution to allow it to respond to violent and inaccurate posts from Mr. Trump and other world leaders without removing the messages. Mr. Dorsey had expressed interest in finding a middle ground, executives said. It also rolled out labels to denote that a tweet needed fact-checking or had videos and photos that had been altered to be misleading.

The effort was overseen by Vijaya Gadde, who leads Twitter’s legal, policy, trust and safety teams. The labels for world leaders, unveiled last June, explained how a politician’s message had broken a Twitter policy and took away tools that could amplify it, like retweets and likes.

“We want to elevate healthy conversations on Twitter and that may sometimes mean offering context,” Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, said in an interview this year.

By the time the labels were introduced, Mr. Trump was not the only head of state testing Twitter’s boundaries. Shortly before Twitter released them, the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, tweeted a sexually explicit video and the Iranian leader Ali Khamenei posted threatening remarks about Israel.

Last month, Twitter used the labels on from the Brazilian politician Osmar Terra in which he falsely claimed that quarantine increased cases of the coronavirus.

“This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules,” the label read. “However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”

On Tuesday, Twitter officials began discussing labeling Mr. Trump’s messages after he falsely asserted that mail-in ballots were illegally printed and implied they would lead to fraud in the November election. His tweets were flagged to Twitter through a portal it had opened specifically for nonprofit groups and local officials involved in election integrity to report content that could discourage or interfere with voting.

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Twitter quickly concluded that Mr. Trump had posted false information about mail-in ballots. The company then labeled two of his tweets, urging people to “get the facts” about voting by mail. An in-house team of fact checkers also assembled a list of what people should know about mail-in ballots.

Mr. Trump struck back, drafting an executive order designed to chip away at Section 230. He and his allies also singled out a Twitter employee who had publicly criticized him and other Republicans, falsely suggesting that employee was responsible for the labels.

Mr. Dorsey and his executives kept on alert. On Wednesday, Twitter , including those that falsely claimed to include images of Derek Chauvin, the white police officer who was charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in , an African-American man in Minnesota.

Mr. Trump did not let up. Even after Twitter called out his shooting tweet for glorifying violence, he the same sentiment again.

“Looting leads to shooting,” Mr. Trump wrote, adding that he did not want violence to occur. “It was spoken as a fact.”

This time, Twitter did not label the tweet.

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Yes Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for 'glorifying violence ... Alex Brandon / AP Tweets can be career-enders for the twits who post them. Remember the Taco Bell from 2012 who didn’t reckon it a firing offense to tweet a video of himself peeing onto a sumptuous heap of Nachos BellGrande. To no one’s surprise but his own, he reckoned wrong.

I’ve often wondered whether President Donald Trump, with his impulsive, counterproductive, inadvertently self-revealing tweets, could ever meet the same fate. The question was raised anew (by me) this week. It was a week shortened by the holiday, and Trump made fewer public statements than he does in a normal week. And so, away from the gaze of his admirers and the prying eyes of the press, he tweeted instead.

Seeing Trump exclusively through the prism of Twitter gives an incomplete picture, of course. It is best to take him in his totality as a public figure, not only on social media but also in the zig and zag of his press briefings, in his Oval Office Q&As, in the set-piece speeches with their mash-ups of scripted rhetoric and chaotic improvisation, in the answers shouted above the roar of Marine One. Yet Twitter isolates parts of his public approach to the world and throws them into sharp relief—useful to anyone more interested in understanding him than in hating or venerating him, if any such people are left after the past four years. (Anyone? Anyone?)

You can be forgiven for forgetting—especially after his “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” tweet, sent out while cities burned—that Trump’s personal Twitter feed occasionally suggests normality. With the approach of Memorial Day last weekend, he was retweeting a series of public-service announcements from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “STOP THE SPREAD OF GERMS … Wash your hands often … Be mindful of social distancing this Memorial Day weekend.”



The tweets wafted through in the late afternoon, evoking the languor of approaching dusk. For a moment, the illusion of a public-spirited chief executive rose up, encouraging his fellow citizens with paternal care, alert to alarms that might upset the commonwealth but eager to give reassurance. Night fell.

“” screamed a tweet suddenly. It was 11 p.m. The tweet was followed violently by the next: “” The tweets offer no context, no clarifying commentary, no hint of what might have inspired them. Did a random snarl from Laura Ingraham suddenly pop into his mind? Did a late-night phone call from a flunky and fellow insomniac—“I can’t believe what those bastards tried to do to you, sir”—act like a bellows on the ever-glowing embers of his resentments? We will never know. He returned to whatever he was doing and went quiet for the night. Eventually, the mysterious “OBAMAGATE!” tweet was “liked” 320,000 times, presumably by people with no more clue than the rest of us as to why he had decided to tweet it in the dead of night, but who delighted in it for reasons of their own.

First thing the next morning, the president . He threatened to pull August’s Republican National Convention from Charlotte, North Carolina, unless the state’s “Democrat governor” agreed to allow the full complement of tens of thousands of Republicans, journalists, concessionaires, and hangers-on into “the Arena,” where they would be free to breathe on one another unmolested by the state-sponsored Karens of public health. Arriving in four parts, the thread was Homeric by the president’s own standards and by the those of Twitter, which pounds the human attention span into powder. As if to demonstrate the point, the president’s Twitter line erupted again with self-retweets from the previous night: “OBAMAGATE!” and “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Again, no way to know why. Self-retweeting offers private pleasure that requires no justification beyond itself. (The president also found time Tuesday to mention a “,” The Atlantic.)

The president is a great retweeter, of course. He has been known to post more than 100 tweets from other accounts in a single day. His most popular retweet from Memorial Day weekend was a photo of Joe Biden looking Snoopy-like in a virus-defeating face mask. Thus Trump at once explicitly ridiculed his political opponent and, by implication, the whole idea of mask wearing. Or maybe not! That’s the beauty of retweets. Trump has never bothered to say in his Twitter bio or elsewhere whether his “retweets = endorsements.” He makes full use of the ambiguity, publicizing the opinions of other twits and then scurrying away from their implications, as when he retweeted a tweet calling for the firing of Anthony Fauci, with whom he was apparently and momentarily displeased. With its lightning pace and constant churn, its quick and indiscriminate burial of falsehood and truth in the endless blizzard of new assertions, Twitter is the perfect medium for having your cake and eating it too.

The medium’s systemic indifference to accuracy and truth makes what happened the day after Memorial Day all the more peculiar. The president began the morning flogging one of his recent obsessions: the terrible scourge, as he sees it, of mail-in voting. His tweets on the subject, as on other subjects, were scattershot and only semi-coherent, containing half-truths, outright inaccuracies, and speculation expressed as fact. Typical Twitter fare, in other words, from the president no less than his enemies. Out of nowhere, gnomes from Twitter’s corporate hierarchy appeared. They hung the . Twitter directed readers to “fact-checks” from CNN and The Washington Post, two mainstream news organizations reflexively (and sometimes comically) hostile to Trump and whatever his agenda happens to be at the moment. “We added a label,” Twitter’s nameless gnomes explained, “to enhance our civic integrity policy.”



A civic-integrity policy? Twitter? The mind reels. You might as well take an abstinence class at a bordello. Trump’s outrage was volcanic, and I can’t really blame him. He opened his Twitter account more than a decade ago. If he’s tweeted once, he’s tweeted, well, 52,000 times. And now Twitter has decided he shouldn’t get away with it any longer? Trump must have felt like Babe Ruth, who, according to an old story, spent the first several innings of a sweltering ball game consuming a half-dozen hot dogs, a couple of hamburgers, several boxes of Cracker Jack, and a dozen pretzels washed down by nearly as many bottles of beer. Before taking the field in the seventh inning, he wolfed down an apple. A minute later, he collapsed in right field. When he came to, he said: “I knew I shouldn’t have eaten that apple.” (The story is possibly apocryphal. We must get the Post to fact-check it.)

Trump’s immediate reaction to that blue exclamation point was Trumpian—in a tweet, he re-upped a revolting accusation against a random political enemy. Had Joe Scarborough, the early-morning-talk-show host, murdered a young female intern 20 years ago? “Maybe or maybe not,” the with a regal shrug. He was just asking! Again, the mechanics of Twitter exposed him in ways none of his other bad habits does. The tweet couldn’t help him in any conceivable manner beyond the immediate, prurient thrill it must have given him, and it very likely hurts him with the fence-sitting swing voters whom he will need most in November. Repeating the claim served chiefly to demonstrate that his compulsion to strike back at his enemies—any enemy will do—easily overwhelms his ability to make rational calculations about his future.

But how far does he dare go? On Thursday, Trump struck back with an executive order directing his administration to reconsider the special legal protections that enable Twitter and other social media to survive. The statutory exemption from libel suits, for example, has made possible the coruscating eruptions of falsehood and innuendo that keep Twitter going and make it indispensable to so many of the twits. Without the exemption, the company likely wouldn’t continue in anything like its present form. Trump wants to end Twitter as we know it—as he knows it.

Trump is making a strange bet, freighted with ironies that double back on themselves. Nothing—at least this week—would please the president more than to sink Twitter, his newest enemy. And yet nothing would deprive him of more pleasure than losing Twitter, his oldest enabler. His two strongest instincts stand pitted against each other: his need for attention and his need to punish enemies—even an enemy whose business is to satisfy his need for attention. Consistency, ideological or personal, is not the president’s strong suit. But seldom has an inconsistency cut so deep.

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is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of ; ; and . [https://atlanticmedia.122.2o7.net/b/ss/atlanticprod/1/H.22--NS/0]

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