Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of “Trust and Safety” who oversaw the big tech platform’s censorship policies, faced intense scrutiny from Republican lawmakers on Wednesday during a “Twitter Files” House Oversight Committee hearing.
Throughout the hearings Roth drew ire from Republicans over numerous topics, including Twitter’s controversial hosting of child pornogrophy, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 Presidential Election, and censoring conservative content at the behest of the government.
When Roth, accompanied by the Big Tech platform’s leftist censorship czar and Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde and former FBI counsel James Baker, was questioned by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), the former employee conceded that none of Twitter’s policies were violated by the Hunter Biden laptop story published by the New York Post.
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Roth at the time falsely claimed that it violated their “hacked materials” policy, thus justifying censorship of the story. Biggs and the Oversight Committee said the move interfered in the 2020 election.
Roth was also slammed for the company’s bias against conservatives and the Trump administration, with Rep. Jim Comer (R-KY) grilling him for tweeting accusations that 45th President Donald Trump’s White House had “actual nazis.”
When questioned by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Roth admitted to using disappearing messaging systems to communicate with U.S. government officials, who frequently requested that the platform censor criticisms of election integrity and COVID-19 policies.
“Did you or others at Twitter communicate with government officials by means of disappearing messaging systems like Signal, Snapchat, or Wickr?” Gosar asked the panel of former Twitter employees. “Yes,” Roth replied.
During her questioning, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) slammed Roth over the company’s reluctance to remove child porn off their site.
“It’s amazing to me, Mr. Roth, as the head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, your ability, or should I say inability, to remove child porn. And here’s something that disgusts me about you: In your doctoral dissertation entitled ‘Gay Data,’ you argued that minors should have access to Grindr — an adult male gay hookup app. Minors, really?” Greene said.
“You permanently banned my Twitter account, but you allowed child porn all over Twitter. Twitter had become a platform, you said, ‘connecting queer young adults.’ You also wrote on Twitter in 2010, ‘can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers,'” Greene said.
“In 2021, while you were the Director of Trust and Safety at Twitter, an underage boy and his mother announced a lawsuit against Twitter because Twitter was benefiting from and refused to remove a lewd video featuring this boy and another minor. That is repulsive,” Greene added.
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Roth faced scrutiny from freshman Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who informed the Twitter executives that using private cloud servers to communicate with U.S. government officials requesting content removal was “highly illegal.”
“Do you remember communicating on a private cloud to remove a posting? Yes or no,” Luna asked. “I don’t believe I can give you a yes or no answer,” Roth nervously said.
“Well, I’m gonna tell you right you now that you did and we have proof of it. This, ladies and gentlemen, is joint action between the federal government and a private company to censor and violate the First Amendment,” Luna said.
“It’s highly illegal. You were all engaged in this action and I want you to know that you all will be held accountable.”
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This news and commentary by Andrew White originally appeared on Valiant News.
