generic Twitter Exec Who Censored Hunter Biden Laptop Story Resigns after Musk Takeover
The Twitter executive responsible for censoring the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop exposé resigned Thursday after Elon Musk’s takeover.
Yoel Roth continued to serve as Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety for weeks after Musk’s acquisition of the platform, helping Musk in his mission to make the company’s content-moderation policies more consistent.
“Update on our efforts to combat hateful conduct: We’ve not only mitigated the recent surge in harmful behavior, but have reduced impressions on this content in Search by ~95% relative to even prior baseline levels. We’re continuing our work to make Twitter safer every day,” Roth tweeted Wednesday.
Staff discovered he had resigned on the company slack channel, employees told the New York Post. Roth joins a slew of other Twitter heavyweights who have quit abruptly since Musk started cleaning house.
Roth then changed his role to past tense in his bio on Twitter: “Former Head of Trust & Safety at @Twitter.”
The 35-year-old executive led the team that suppressed the Post’s exclusive stories on Hunter Biden’s shady foreign business dealings ahead of the 2020 election, barring users from sharing the story publicly and from privately messaging the link to other users. Major newspapers, including the Washington Post and New York Times, later confirmed the authenticity of much of the material drawn from Hunter Biden’s laptop. At the time of the election, Big Tech platforms including Facebook and Twitter cast the Post’s reporting as potential foreign disinformation.
Amid the takeover negotiations in late October, some conservative personalities reminded Musk about the progressive political bias of some of Twitter’s senior leaders, such as Roth. He once compared members of the Trump administration to “actual Nazis.” He also likened Trump’s spokesperson Kellyanne Conway to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
Yet Musk defended Roth in the comments, saying: “I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.”
Musk circulated a few emails within the company this week, detailing his plans to make operations leaner, more efficient, and profitable, according to the New York Times. After dismissing nearly half of Twitter’s staff, he demanded the remainder end remote work and spend at least 40 hours a week in the office. Musk axed CEO Parag Agrawal and other top management as soon as he finalized the acquisition.
In emails, Musk also announced his plans to transition Twitter to the subscription model, which he hopes will generate more revenue than advertising. Without these aggressive adaptations, Twitter may “not survive,” he warned.
