Ex-Twitter exec details ‘wave of homophobic and anti-Semitic threats’ abuse

However, former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth may have already received excessive punishment, as he described a “wave” of online threats when new Twitter CEO Elon Musk decided to resolve the issue on his own terms. Former Twitter executives admitted this week (to Congress, no less) that blocking a 2020 story involving Hunter Biden was the wrong move.

Ex-Twitter executives gathered on Wednesday before a House committee to discuss the specifics of the social media platform’s decision to censor a New York Post report in 2020 about emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Yoel Roth, a former leader of trust and safety, was one of them and was instrumental in the laptop choice. Elon Musk “took the decision to disseminate a libelous accusation that I support or condone pedophilia, and this lie led directly to a wave of homophobic and antisemitic threats and harassment against me from which Twitter has deleted vanishingly little,” he claimed in testimony to Congress.

The new House Republican majority called the hearing where Roth testified and has been concentrating on the matter — which involves an email from 2015 between then-vice president Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and a Ukrainian businessman — as part of a larger inquiry into the Biden family’s business dealings that the GOP launched last month. Since regaining control of the House last year, Republican representatives have demanded increased investigation of Biden and the Democratic Party and have charged Big Tech firms like Twitter with stifling conservative online speech. And in the increasingly right-leaning Musk, they have an ally.

The NYP piece was prevented from being distributed on Twitter in 2020, a controversial decision that Twitter later withdrew. Republicans and Elon Musk have claimed that the government ordered the story to be suppressed from the top down, but the FBI has refuted this assertion. Republicans have intensified their accusations that Big Tech firms have worked closely with Democrats since gaining control of the House, using the NYP story’s censoring as a shining example.

When Musk assumed control of Twitter last year, he demanded full accountability for the incident, approving the publication of the “Twitter Files” in December, which he said provided proof of the “Hunter Biden story suppression” by Twitter’s previous leadership.

House Republicans, many of whom have accused Twitter of being biased against conservatives and in favor of Musk’s acquisition, have been looking into the Twitter executives in command at the time this week. The former Twitter executives who were the target of the files, however, reported a terrifying experience and a barrage of vitriol, some of which was magnified by Musk himself, while Republicans and Musk praised the Twitter Files as a victory for justice and transparency.

An “internet harassment wave”

Roth, who quit Twitter in November, claimed that after Musk shared what Roth called defamatory tweets in December, which implied Roth was a proponent of child sexualization based on a 2016 dissertation he completed at the University of Pennsylvania, Roth had been the target of a campaign of homophobic and antisemitic harassment.

Roth was a significant figure in many of Twitter’s important content safety decisions, including the recommendations to suppress the Hunter Biden article and to suspend former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account in 2021.

In December, Musk wrote that the company’s leadership team routinely took “difficult decisions” without consulting former CEO and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, a longtime friend and acquaintance of Musk. Roth and other former executives were frequently criticized by Musk last year. He wrote, “The prisoners were running the asylum.”

Roth claimed that after Musk tweeted about him, he started receiving several death threats. He was eventually forced to leave his house with his partner after a British newspaper doxxed him, revealing his home location.

“After the Daily Mail made the choice to disclose my address, I ultimately had to vacate and sell my house. He stated during the House hearing that those were the repercussions for this sort of harassment and rhetoric.

According to Roth, he was not the only executive impacted by the disclosure of the Twitter Files because numerous other Twitter employees all around the world also received doxxing and personal threats.

First and foremost, he stated, “The Twitter Files affected considerably more junior employees at Twitter, not just myself.” “Employees were doxxed, had their families threatened, and suffered harm equivalent to or greater than what I endured,” one worker said, referring to Manila in the Philippines.

The threats against him, according to Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat from the District of Columbia, were “very serious consequences” of the online abuse brought on by the Twitter Files. Norton also criticized House Republicans for their style of questioning, which had the potential to disseminate false and harmful conspiracy theories.

“Committee Republicans are putting a torch to a powder keg by legitimizing unfounded conspiracy theories about the deep state, big tech, and government censorship for political advantage,” she claimed.

While Democrats, Big Tech, and Musk have been the targets of accusations of collusion and censorship by Republicans, the Twitter Files, and Elon Musk, former Twitter employees and government officials have also claimed that the Trump administration routinely asked Twitter to remove particular posts, according to a report this week in Rolling Stone.

The White House then asked Twitter to remove the statement when popular model Chrissy Teigen attacked Trump on the social media platform in 2019. According to Rolling Stone, that was only one of numerous other occasions where the Trump administration and legislative Republicans “often pressured Twitter to take down messages they objected to.”

Another former executive, Anika Collier Navaroli, stated in court that the White House had contacted Twitter to urge that Chrissy Teigen’s message be removed. They desired its removal because it contained a disparaging remark against the president, she claimed. The New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retorted, “So much for bias against right wing on Twitter,” in response to her claim that Twitter changed its rules, which would have automatically classified Trump’s tweets as a violation of the company’s rules, including in the run-up to the Jan. 6 Capitol Riots.

In the meantime, the former Twitter executives refuted suggestions that the Biden family or any other political group had a hand in the choice to censor the NYP report in 2020.