Second, destruction of documents could also prove relevant as part of an investigation into whether false statements were given under oath. Twitter executives denied such secret suppression efforts both in public and before Congress. Indeed, a recent federal filing revealed a 2021 email between Twitter executives and Carol Crawford, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s digital media chief. Crawford wanted to censor “unapproved opinions” on social media; Twitter replied that “with our CEO testifying before Congress this week [it] is tricky.”

At that hearing, social-media companies were asked about my prior testimony on private censorship in circumventing the First Amendment. In response, Dorsey insisted that “we don’t have a censoring department.” Dorsey also expressly denied under oath that there was “shadow banning” based on political ideology.

Likewise, in 2018, Gadde and Head of Product Kayvon Beykpour expressly declared, “We do not shadow ban. And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

It turns out you don’t need a “department” if the entire company was acting as a massive censorship and suppression machine. Moreover, one “department” Dorsey did not mention was the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET, that operated above what journalist Bari Weiss described as “official ticketing.” That group reportedly included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde, Global Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth, subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal and others.