Former Twitter employee feared 'people were going to die' on January 6

• A former Twitter employee testified to the January 6 committee about Trump's impact on the platform.
• The employee described being on "pins and needles" ahead of the January 6 insurrection.
• The employee worried "people were going to die."

A former Twitter employee told the House committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol that activity on the platform raised concerns that there would be deadly violence in Washington on January 6.

The former employee, whose voice was obscured in a recording played during Tuesday's hearing, testified about trying and failing to get the company to intervene as former President Donald Trump's extremist supporters used the platform to repeat his statements about the upcoming protests to the 2020 election results.

On the night of January 5, the employee testified about slacking a colleague, a message to the effect of, "When people are shooting each other tomorrow, I will try and rest in the knowledge that we tried."

The former employee was on a team responsible for platform and content moderation policies during 2020 and 2021.

The employee testified about being on "pins and needles" ahead of the insurrection because "for months, I had been begging, and anticipating,  and attempting to raise the reality that if we made no intervention into what I saw occurring, people were going to die and on January 5th, I realized no intervention was coming." 

"Not even as hard as I had tried to create one or implement one, there was nothing, and we were at the whims and the mercy of a violent crowd that was locked and loaded," the employee said.

Twitter considered adopting a stricter content moderation policy after Trump told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by" during the September 29, 2020 presidential debate, but the company chose not to act, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said during the hearing.

The former Twitter employee testified that after the debate, "My concern was that the former president for seemingly the first time was speaking directly to extremist organizations and giving them directives. We had not seen that sort of direct communication before and that concerned me."

The employee said Twitter "relished the knowledge that they were also the favorite and most used service of the former president."

Twitter permanently suspended Trump on January 8, 2021, "due to the risk of further incitement of violence."

The employee said Twitter gave Trump preferential treatment.

"If former President Donald Trump were any other user on Twitter, he would have been permanently suspended a very long time ago," the employee said.