Twitter’s Former Head Of Trust And Safety Wants To Cleanse The Internet Of Dissent

Late last month, Yoel Roth — the former head of trust and safety at Twitter — was a featured panelist at a conference hosted by the Knight Foundation titled “Informed: Conversations On Democracy In The Digital Age.” Roth spent the hour-long panel fielding editorialized questions from left-wing tech journalist Kara Swisher in which the two revealed how leftists view Big Tech as little more than a mechanism for further consolidating their grip on institutionalized power.

Roth’s answers provide insight into how he, and likely the majority of his peers in the managerial elite, feel about the intersection of institutional power and the rights of American citizens. Big Tech and Silicon Valley have a well-documented disdain for free speech, and people like Roth seemingly believe they have a moral obligation to perpetuate a censorship regime that overwhelmingly favors leftwing political figures and their preferred cultural trends. 

During the discussion, Roth stated that he advised his old team from Twitter, who he believes are “highly values-driven and have chosen to do the work of internet sanitation,” to think about Musk’s acquisition of the company as “being a frog in a pot of boiling water” and to write down their personal “limits” that they should use to determine when and if they ought to cease working for Twitter. 

When asked what his “red line” was for leaving the company, the former trust and safety lead, who is believed to have been a key figure in suppressing the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and who likened Trump officials to Nazis, said, “I will not lie for [Elon Musk].”

However, Roth indicated that Elon Musk’s “procedural legitimacy” — what he described as the structured, disciplined process for making substantive decisions — was neither democratic nor transparent enough for him to be comfortable remaining at Twitter. Swisher, the panel’s moderator, implied Musk’s corporate leadership style invoked dictatorial tendencies by saying he “tended towards the authoritarian” as opposed to a “consensus-driven” approach and was encouraged by “enablers” who “say yes all day long and lick him up and down continually.”

Roth was adamant that he wouldn’t “lie” for Musk; that crossed a line and violated his moral code. However, one could be excused for not taking Roth’s self-righteous preenings at face value, considering that during his tenure as the head of trust and safety, Twitter was frequently used to disseminate child pornography, send constant violent threats to traditional religious communities, and facilitate transactions by human traffickers, all while allowing the perpetuation of political disinformation that overwhelmingly favored leftists causes.

During the panel, Roth insisted that he was not involved in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. But documents that have recently become public, known as the “Twitter Files,” indicate that since 2018 he had “weekly meetings” with “federal law enforcement agencies” who were priming him to be on the lookout for sensitive information implicating people close to 2020 presidential campaigns. It was in these meetings that Roth, in his own words, “learned … that