Twitter Execs on Decision to Ban Jacob Wohl | Joe Rogan

I don't know if you have any data on why Jacob Wall was recently banned. Do you have that? I believe who is tickable? He's uh, I don't know describe me It's a conservative personality, but he's very very Controversial for like fake news or something. I don't know too much about him So I don't want to accuse him of things cuz I don't know who he is but he was he was in something where he tried accusing Mueller of like Sexual assaults and it turned out to be like just completely fake ridiculous This is a gentleman that was in the USA Today article where he admitted that he was going to he had Used tactics in the past to influence the election and he will continue to do so using all of his channels Yes, and so when we saw that report our team looked at his account We noticed there were multiple accounts tied to his account So fake accounts that he created that were discussing political issues and pretending to be other people How do you find that out? We would have phone numbers linking accounts together or email addresses in some cases IP addresses other types of metadata that are associated with accounts so we can link those accounts together and Having multiple accounts in and of itself is not a violation of our rules Cuz some people have their you know work account their personal account is when you're deliberately Pretending to be someone else and manipulating a conversation about a political issue and those are exactly the state the types of things that we saw The Russians do for example in the 2016 election So it was that playbook and that type of activity that we saw about Jacob wall And that's why his accounts were suspended. Did you investigate Jonathan Morgan? I don't know who that is why? That's that's the important question. Why I don't I don't know who that is But that's that's it might be that someone at Twitter investigated him. I personally don't know who that so One of the issues that I think is really important to get to is you should know who he is He's more important than Jacob wall is but for some reason you know about this conservative guy and not the Democrat who Helped metal in the Alabama election well so Jonathan this according to the sheer volume that they have to pay attention to right right right But it's it's about grains of sand making a heap in the flow of a direction where we can see Jacob wall has said he's Done this so you're like we're gonna investigate we ban him It was recently reported and covered by numerous outlets that a group called new knowledge was meddling in the Alabama election by creating fake Russian Accounts to manipulate national media into believing that Roy Moore was propped up by the Russians Facebook banned him and as well as for other people But Twitter didn't I believe he did ban the accounts that were engaged in the behavior I do remember that I do remember sending this to the general team that's worse though So you didn't ban the guy doing it, but you banned the people like so so in the case of Jacob wall We were able to directly attribute through email addresses and phone numbers his direct connection to the accounts that were created to manipulate the election If we're not able to tie that direct connection on our platform or law enforcement doesn't give us Information to tie attribution we won't take action and it's not because of political ideology It's because we want to be damn sure before we take action on it So someone could use a VPN perhaps and maybe Additional email accounts and they could game the system in that we're certainly sophisticated ways that people can can do Things to mask who they are and what accounts that they're just the internal conversation to just to provide more light into What happens like I got a I got an email or text from Vija One morning and said we are going to permanently suspend this particular account and it's not a You know, what do you think it's we are going to do this and I then have an opportunity at task questions I asked a question why she gave me a link back to the document of all the findings and USA Today We took the action I was on Twitter a bunch of people pointed me at this particular case sent some of those tweets to her What's going on? So that's well, that's in the background. Wouldn't you just terminate anybody associated with the company that was doing this? I mean keep in mind to at the time when this campaign was happening this is what basis He had he admitted to engaging in the operation in a quote to New York Times and you banned the accounts associated with it So if you know he's the one running the company wouldn't you be like, okay, you're gone Um, do you want us to take every single newspaper accounts? Attribution because what we were able to do in the Jacob wall situation was actually tie those accounts in our own systems Right that he controlled the right not just take the word of a newspaper. Oh, yeah, you can have you said you said you banned his accounts Yes, and you know from his own statement and from his tweets that he was the run running running the company Jacob wall. No, no, no Jonathan Morgan. Oh, sorry. I'm getting confused about so Jacob wall it's announced in the USA today. He says I'm doing this and you're like, okay We can look at his account we can see it we get rid of him with with new knowledge You said you did take those accounts down I believe we were able to take down a certain cluster of accounts that we saw engaging in the behavior But we won't weren't necessarily able to tie it back to one person controlling those even if they say they did it Do you and this is where I get back like we'd like to have some sort of attribution? That's direct that we can see would we just take the any? newspaper or any article at face value and just action them I think would you have to contact him and get some sort of a statement from him in order to take down his account? I mean, I don't think he would admit to manipulating Twitter if to a rest of them So if you get the fact that he communicated with a newspaper right to clarify What they said what they claimed to the New York Times was that it was a false flag New York Times said they reviewed internal documents that showed they admitted it was a false flag operation The guy who runs the company said oh his company does this he wasn't aware necessarily But it was an experiment so he's given kind of in my opinion duplicitous like, you know Not straightforward, but at the time of this campaign which he claims to know about he tweeted that it was real So during the Roy Moore campaign he tweets Wow look at the Russians Then it comes out later his company's the one that did it. So you're kind of like oh, so this guy was propping up his own Fake news right then when they get busted he goes oh, no It's just my company doing an experiment But you tweeted it was real pyramid you use your verified Twitter account to push the fake narrative your company was pumping on this platform And so so the point I want to make I guess is it sounds like we need to take a closer look at this one Bantam bring back Morgan. Well, well Megan Murphy Megan Murphy. Sorry Morgan Murphy's a friend of mine To So this is I haven't read the story it's been like two months since the story broke so I could have my you know I don't want to I don't want to get sued and have my facts wrong but the reason I bring this up was not to accuse you of wrongdoing was to point out that I Don't I don't think that the people who work at Twitter are twirling their mustaches laughing, you know But pressing the band button whenever they see a conservative. I think it's just there's a bias that's unintentional that flows in one direction So you see the news about Jacob wall, and I think there's a reason for it, too There's a couple reasons for one yours your staff is likely more you've mentioned more likely to lean left and look at certain sources So you're gonna hear about more things more often and take action on those things as opposed to the other side of the coin But we have to consider like where the actions are taking place I'm speaking more broadly to the 4,000 people that we have as a company versus Deliberateness that we have on bridges team I just mean when we when we look at a company wide average of all of your employees and the direction they lean Versus the news sources they're willing to read you're going to see a flow in one direction whether it's intentional or not And so I think the challenge is but we don't generally rely on news sources to find manipulation of our platform We're looking at what we're seeing the signals we can see once in a while We will get tipped off to something but like for the most part when we're looking at manipulation It's not like the New York Times can tell us like what's going on on the platform We're the ones that have the metadata about accounts were the ones that can see pattern to behavior at scale But it's gonna hear your point I knew one name and I didn't know another name and it was because Vigia said, you know we're permanently banning this account and Yes, we we didn't have the same sort of findings in the other particular account Which I got feedback on passed to her and and we didn't find what we needed fun I think but to be clear the team had taken action on those stuff months ago when it actually had happened Got it