Here’s what the Jan. 6 committee left out about social media’s role in the Capitol attack
Understanding the role social media played in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol takes on greater significance as tech platforms undo some of the measures they adopted to prevent political misinformation on their platforms.
The committee staffers who focused on social media and extremism — known within the committee as “Team Purple” — spent more than a year sifting through tens of thousands of documents from multiple companies, interviewing social media company executives and former staffers, and analyzing thousands of posts. They sent a flurry of subpoenas to social media companies ranging from Facebook to fringe social networks including Gab and the chat platform Discord.
When the #ExecuteMikePence hashtag started trending on Twitter on Jan. 6, 2021, Collier Navaroli was sitting in her New York apartment, scrolling through thousands of death threats and other hateful messages and trying to remove them one by one. The Purple Team’s draft outlines how extremism and violent rhetoric jumped from platform to platform in the lead-up to Jan 6. In the hours after Trump’s tweet about how Jan. 6 would be wild, the chat service Discord had to shut down a server because Trump’s supporters were using it to plan how they could bring firearms into Washington, according to the memo.
Facebook parent company Meta declined to comment. Twitter, which has laid off the majority of its communications staff, did not respond to a request for comment. Discord did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Former Facebook employees who testified to the committee reported their company also resisted imposing restrictions. Brian Fishman, the company’s former head of dangerous organizations, testified that the company had been slow to react to efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election results.
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