Yoel Roth, Twitter’s erstwhile chief of trust and safety, was a speaker at the Knight Foundation’s “Informed” conference last month.
Roth spent an hour addressing editorialized queries from left-wing tech writer Kara Swisher, revealing how lefties regard Big Tech as a tool to consolidate power.
Roth’s replies reveal how he and most of his management contemporaries feel about institutional authority and citizen rights.
Big Tech and Silicon Valley detest freedom of speech, and individuals like Roth think they have a moral duty to preserve a censorship system that favors leftwing political personalities and cultural trends.
Yoel Roth made an entire career out of intellectualizing his homosexual fetishes – even writing his PhD dissertation on his random GRINDr encounters. He then got put in charge of censoring "hate speech" on twitter. A path to power and a reality most GOP voters aren't aware of. pic.twitter.com/EmhuNCHxtP
— Märtin (@davidcrockettfa) December 3, 2022
“Internet Cleanups”
Roth told his previous Twitter employees, who he says are “very values-driven and have chosen to conduct internet cleanup,” to think of Musk’s acquisition as “being a frog inside a boiling pot of water” and to put down their own “limits” to assess when and if they must stop working for Twitter.
The previous trust and safety head, who is thought to have suppressed the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop and who compared Trump officials to Nazis, added, “I would not lie for Elon Musk.”
Roth said Elon Musk’s “procedural legitimacy” (organized, disciplined method for making substantive judgments) is not liberal nor fair enough for him to stay at Twitter.
What About Musk?
Swisher, the panel facilitator, claimed Musk’s corporate style of leadership was dictatorial by claiming he “tended more toward the autocratic” instead of a “consensus-driven” style and was backed by “enablers” who “answer yes all day round and suck him up and down repeatedly.”
Roth wouldn’t “lie” for Musk; it contradicted his moral ethic.
During Roth’s time in office as head of trust and safety, Twitter was used to distribute child porn, send consistent violent threats to conventional religious social groups, and execute transactions by human traffickers, all the while allowing leftist political false news.
The ex safety chief (and censor) of Twitter is absolutely everything you'd dream he'd be @yoelroth another appalling creation of modern higher ed https://t.co/et92oyl4LA
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) December 4, 2022
A History of Censorship and Free Speech Suppression
Roth denied hiding the Hunter Biden laptop report at the hearing. The “Twitter Files” reveals he held “monthly meetings” with “federal law enforcement agencies” in 2018 to be on the watch for sensitive material compromising 2020 presidential candidates. Roth “learned… that a wiretap effort would implicate Hunter Biden.”
Roth was ready to limit the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story from the beginning before the New York Post reported on it. The New York Times purported disclosures of Trump’s tax records weren’t treated similarly.
Swisher asked Roth if he thought Twitter was “safer” with Musk in control, as he once suggested via tweet. Roth replied, “I don’t,” and blamed a “trolling marketing strategy.” He also said that “malevolent creativity,” a term made famous by Nina Jankowicz, the former executive head of the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board, made it harder to “sanitize” and regulate what people say online.
Roth stated that Twitter’s suspension of Trump after Jan. 6 was due to “trauma” faced by Big Tech “content censors” from discrepant political participation.
Blocking and Censoring Content?
The corporate elite, who believe they must “sanitize” the internet and remove heterodox speech, see themselves as warriors in the struggle for social emancipation, fighting to protect the internet’s most vulnerable demographics. In reality, they’re petty tyrants who wear sweatpants instead of jackboots and undermine their host country’s civil norms.
If Twitter’s content censors were concerned about trauma, why did they enable the abuse and murder of Covington Catholic High Schoolers in 2019? Why didn’t they stop lefties from doxing owners of small businesses and individual citizens during the BLM riots in 2020? Why didn’t they stop adults from sexualizing kids?
To these folks, “trauma” occurs when someone expresses a right-wing perspective or doesn’t clearly endorse a leftist assumption. It’s a one-way street governed by the most potent business monopolies ever.
Roth defended Twitter’s decision to remove The Babylon Bee over a joke about Rachel Levine being a male. “Targeting and victimizing the trans people on Twitter is real, life-threatening, and serious,” he stated. “It’s not humorous, it’s harmful, and it makes some people unsafe in the world,” he added.
Roth blames account managers like LibsofTikTok for a speech like the Bee’s joke, which he calls life-threatening. Transgender identitarians may experience psychological anguish from communication that doesn’t validate their identity.
It doesn’t help if you made a joke they don’t get, oppose a leftist cultural change in your area, or despise the national status quo. Any criticism of their ideology threatens their hegemonic control, and they won’t rest until dissent is eliminated.
Roth isn’t unique; he was in the right IT firm at the right moment. There are hundreds (or millions) of individuals like him who gatekeep the online public square to protect their status in our society’s ruling coalition. We won’t be free until we stop petty tyrants from restricting our speech, business, and government.
This article appeared in NewsHouse and has been published here with permission.
