Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth wrote a New York Times op-ed that can only be described as one long whiny self-victimizing rant.
From the headline to the last word, Roth pathetically begged readers for pity from while complaining about being attacked for censoring former president Donald Trump. “I Was Attacked by Trump and Musk. It Was a Strategy to Change What You See Online,” the headline read before The Times edited it to be something less laughable.
Yes, the man who quite literally led the department at Twitter that changed and controlled “what you see online” now doesn’t like the taste of his own medicine. “Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire,”. he wrote.
Roth noted being harassed by internet trolls after Trump and his staff called attention to him and the censorship he and his team relentlessly carried out against users who bucked leftist narratives. “I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident,” Roth claimed. “It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.” The lack of self-awareness is deafening.
Twitter’s former Trust and Safety chief notably whined that the pressures not to censor made it difficult for him to ban Trump. “As violence unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Jack Dorsey, then the C.E.O. of Twitter, overruled Trust and Safety’s recommendation that Mr. Trump’s account should be banned because of several tweets” he wrote.
Roth, however, failed to mention that Twitter employees made up a reason to censor Trump. When the Safety team assessed Trump’s last tweets, it initially “determined that there is no violation of our policies” then-Twitter policy official Anika Navaroli wrote. Trump was de-platformed when Twitter employees argued that he should be considered “the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler.”
Roth spent the majority of his complaint lamenting that the so-called “safety” structures he and his team built to censor content are being dismantled.
“Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online,” he wrote. “Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.”
With dramatic flair, Roth added “These attacks on internet safety and security come at a moment when the stakes for democracy could not be higher.”
It would be remiss not to mention Roth’s dismissal of The Twitter Files which repeatedly implicate him. “The files were hyped by Mr. Musk as a groundbreaking form of transparency, purportedly exposing for the first time the way Twitter’s coastal liberal bias stifles conservative content.” Citing TechDirt journalist Mike Masnick he responded claiming “in the end ‘there was absolutely nothing of interest’ in the documents, and what little there was had significant factual errors.”
Well, Mr. Roth, if the Twitter Files are significantly inaccurate, please enlighten the public. While the U.S. government working with Twitter to silence Americans’ discussion, memes, genuine concerns, and questions may be of no interest to you, to many Americans it is an egregious violation of the First Amendment that should never happen again.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
