Who is Yoel Roth? Twitter's ex-safety chief now ADMITS it was wrong to censor Hunter Biden laptop story
Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, claimed that the social media firm made a mistake when it decided to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. Roth, who quit earlier in November after Elon Musk's $44 billion buyout, stated that the legitimacy of the New York Post's laptop report was impossible for the social media firm to verify, and it was swiftly censored in October 2020.
A front-page New York Post article on Biden's personal life and his controversial business ties to Ukraine was intentionally blocked from sharing by Twitter in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election between Biden's father and Donald Trump. In an interview with journalist Kara Swisher, Roth said, "We didn't know what to believe, we didn't know what was true, there was smoke—and ultimately for me, it didn't reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter. But it set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack and leak campaign alarm bells. Everything about it looked like a hack and leak." Roth's remarks come as Musk prepares to publish documents on Twitter's "free speech suppression," which are likely to contain information on the censorship of the laptop story.
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Former Twitter Safety head @yoyoel shifts blame when admitting to mistake of supressing Hunter Biden Laptop story
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 30, 2022
This is just days after @elonmusk promised to release internal documents proving Twitter's election interference under prior leadership— interesting timing pic.twitter.com/kFtcFi9G93
Biden's laptop's original owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, handed Rudy Giuliani, a representative for Donald Trump, a copy of the device's hard disk in September 2020. Giuliani reportedly provided the New York Post access to the drive's documents and images, and he also handed Trump's former advisor Bannon and his podcast co-host Maxey, a complete copy of the drive.
On Wednesday, November 30, Roth claimed that he had never thought the piece should have been censored despite warning signs. "So it was a mistake?" Swisher questioned to which he replied, "In my opinion, yes."
Roth said that social media platforms were on high alert in 2020, claiming that the FBI had alerted both him and the CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg about foreign propaganda and false information ahead of the election. Roth is the most recent figure to condemn this decision made by the firm after former CEO Jack Dorsey called it a "total mistake" last year.
During a meeting with Lawmakers, Dorsey stated, "We made a total mistake with the New York Post, we corrected that within 24 hours. It was not to do with the content, it had to do with a hacked materials policy, we had an incorrect interpretation."
Musk has condemned Twitter's decision to hide the Biden story on multiple occasions, claiming that if the social media firm wants to regain the public's trust, transparency from the company was "necessary." On Monday, November 28, Musk declared his intention to make Twitter's files public.
Musk wrote "The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened..." He followed up on his remarks hours later on Monday evening, describing his ideas as a conflict between freedom and "tyranny." "This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead," Musk wrote.
