The key enforcer behind President Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter was none other than “trust and safety” chief Yoel Roth, a homosexual who, in 2017, risibly claimed “actual Nazis” were in the White House.
The role Roth played in pushing Trump off the platform for supposedly violating Twitter’s rules is documented in part four of the Twitter Files. Michael Shellenberger, a medical doctor and the author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, compiled the latest installment.
Coincidentally, Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who released the files through Shellenberg, Bari Weiss, and Matt Taibbi, fingered Roth for a line in his deranged “doctoral dissertation.” That monumental work was about “gay” hook-up websites, and included what Musk surmised was a plea to give homosexuals under 18 access to adult “gay” websites.
The nut of Shellenberger’s thread: An unhinged homosexual managed “trust and safety” at a major communications platform and used his power to shut down a sitting president.
Leftist Push to Get Trump
Though “for years, Twitter had resisted calls to ban Trump,” Shellenberger noted in his thread, Twitter execs used those years to build their case, as an earlier Twitter Files dump showed.
In fact, as a corporate entity, Twitter was reluctant to block Trump. He was a “world leader,” and squelching him “would hide important info… [and] hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions,” the platform tweeted.
But then came the mostly peaceful protest at the U.S. Capitol, and the reasonable claims and suspicions that Joe Biden stole the election.
“After the events of Jan 6, the internal and external pressure on Twitter CEO @jack [Dorsey] grows,” Shellenberger wrote:
Former First Lady @MichelleObama , tech journalist @karaswisher , @ADL , high-tech VC @ChrisSacca , and many others, publicly call on Twitter to permanently ban Trump.
Dorsey was on vacation in French Polynesia the week of January 4-8, 2021. He phoned into meetings but also delegated much of the handling of the situation to senior execs @yoyoel , Twitter’s Global Head of Trust and Safety, and @vijaya Head of Legal, Policy, & Trust.
As context, it’s important to understand that Twitter’s staff & senior execs were overwhelmingly progressive.
In 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, & 99% of Twitter staff’s political donations went to Democrats.
In 2017, Roth tweeted that there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.”
In April 2022, Roth told a colleague that his goal “is to drive change in the world,” which is why he decided not to become an academic.
“Progressive” is one way to put it. Unhinged leftists and cult Marx totalitarians are two more.
Employees React
That aside, the pressure worked.
“GUESS WHAT,” Roth wrote in an internal Slack message. “Jack just approved repeat offender for civic integrity,” the threat continues, describing a five-strike rule that ends in suspension:
The new approach would create a system where five violations (“strikes”) would result in permanent suspension.
“Progress!” exclaims a member of Roth’s Trust and Safety Team.
The exchange between Roth and his colleagues makes clear that they had been pushing @jack for greater restrictions on the speech Twitter allows around elections.
The colleague wants to know if the decision means Trump can finally be banned. The person asks, “does the incitement to violence aspect change that calculus?”
Roth says it doesn’t. “Trump continues to just have his one strike” (remaining). …
On January 8, Twitter announces a permanent ban on Trump due to the “risk of further incitement of violence.”
On J8, Twitter says its ban is based on “specifically how [Trump’s tweets] are being received & interpreted.”
That claim went against what Twitter said in 2019, Shellenberger observed. Twitter does “not attempt to determine all potential interpretations of the content or its intent,” the platform averred.
Just one lower-level Twitter employee spoke up about the move against Trump.
“This might be an unpopular opinion but one off ad hoc decisions like this that don’t appear rooted in policy are imho a slippery slope,” the employee wrote. “This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world.”
That didn’t bother Roth, who, undoubtedly, turned lavender with delight about the ban. Indeed, he messaged a “colleague to ask that they add ‘stopthesteal’ & [QAnon conspiracy term] ‘kraken’ to a blacklist of terms to be deamplified,” the files show:
Roth’s colleague objects that blacklisting “stopthesteal” risks “deamplifying counterspeech” that validates the election.
Indeed, notes Roth’s colleague, “a quick search of top stop the steal tweets and they’re counterspeech.”
But they quickly come up with a solution: “deamplify accounts with stopthesteal in the name/profile” since “those are not affiliated with counterspeech.”
As well, employees debated punishing users who shared “screenshots of Trump’s deleted J6 tweets,” Shellenberger reported.
Problem was, that could punish hate-Trump tweeters and leftist conspiracy theorists who shared the screenshots. Nonetheless, those tweets were deleted. But because “the *intention* is not to deny the election result, no punishing strike is applied.”
A sales executive wanted to know what policies the platform was applying to Trump, and whether it would drop the “public interest” rule, which permits tweets from public officials that violate Twitter policy if they “directly contribute[s] to understanding or discussion of a matter of public concern.”
“In this specific case,” Roth confessed, “we’re changing our public interest approach for his account.”
So Twitter targeted Trump. Roth also wanted to ban GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz:
Roth’s Dissertation
Hours before Shellenberger published his thread, Musk suggested that he had changed his opinion of Roth. When he took over Twitter, Musk defended Roth despite his history of hate-Trump and other unhinged remarks, like those about normal Americans who don’t frequent homosexual bathhouses and leather bars in New York and San Francisco: “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”
Musk tweeted a passage from Roth’s “dissertation,” Gay Data, which discussed homosexual hook-up websites.
“Even a cursory recognition that the new medium of gay-targeted social networking may be a crucial social outlet for gay, bisexual, and questioning youth,” Roth wrote:
Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.
Tweeted Biden voter Musk, “looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis.”
So the head of “trust and safety” on Twitter, the man partly in control of platform content and enforcing rules, wrote that “gay” youngsters need access to what amount to “gay” porn and hook-up platforms on the internet.
