Twitter’s ex-head of trust and safety goes silent as more revelations are released
Heather Hunter
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Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” department, hasn’t tweeted since Dec. 1, when new owner Elon Musk started releasing internal documents about the deliberations among employees on censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Normally a regular tweeter, Roth’s last words on the site were about the scandal that was to come.
After appearing on New York magazine’s On with Kara Swisher podcast, he tweeted he was “grateful for the chance to sit down with” Swisher to “talk about the last few years in Trust & Safety at Twitter, warts and all,” before concluding that “the headlines only scratch the surface of the conversation.”
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Roth’s last post on Twitter was in response to that tweet, which had been “ratio’d” 7 to 1, where he seemed to be attempting to defend against the story that would come out the next day.
“If there’s one takeaway, it’s this: What matters most in platform governance is how decisions get made,” he tweeted. “You can armchair quarterback specific choices and mistakes all day. But the real work is figuring out how to make principled decisions when all you have are bad options.”
The Twitter Files have covered specific decisions the former executives made, but they also covered much broader attempts of seemingly silencing certain voices, particularly those coming from the political Right.
On Friday night, journalist Matt Taibbi released new internal Twitter documents suggesting that Roth met weekly with the FBI and allowed the agency to flag election-related content for moderation.
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Since Roth last tweeted, Musk has overseen the release of internal communications among Twitter employees that include deliberations about what content should be banned from the site and discussions about suspending the account of the sitting president of the United States.
Once the documents started coming out, Roth’s account went dormant.