Former Twitter Executive Who Suppressed Hunter Biden Laptop Story Calls Libs of TikTok, Babylon Bee ‘Dangerous’
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The former Twitter executive who led the team responsible for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell before the 2020 presidential election claimed last week that accounts that criticize the transgender movement are “dangerous.”
Yoel Roth, former head of safety and integrity at Twitter, who resigned upon Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company, said the online activities of Libs of TikTok and the Babylon Bee are “f***ed up.” The former is a massively popular account with 1.5 million followers while the latter is a satirical news outlet.
“We have seen from a number of Twitter accounts including Libs of TikTok notably that there are orchestrated campaigns that are particularly singling out a group that is already particularly vulnerable within society,” Roth said at an Informed conference on democracy in the digital age, according to a video reported by Ian Miles Cheong.
Yoel Roth, who no longer works at Twitter, claims that satire is dangerous and that Libs of TikTok and The Babylon Bee are dangerous. I’m glad he’s gone. He was bad for Twitter. pic.twitter.com/OTapsho3GO
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) December 4, 2022
“Not only is it not funny but it is dangerous and contributes to an environment that makes people unsafe. Let’s start from a premise that it’s f***ed up,” he added.
Musk initiated his buyout of the tech giant after noticing a troubling trend of censorship on the site. Babylon Bee was suspended after it posted a joke calling transgender White House official Rachel Levine the “Man of the Year.” Yoel reminded the audience at the seminar that the Bee violated an explicit prohibition on “misgendering,” even if the reference was embedded in comedy.
“That’s satire,” the interviewer told Roth. “Nominally, but it’s still misgendering,” he replied.
Since taking the helm, Musk has worked to improve Twitter’s content-moderation policies to be more equally applied to left- and right-wing political organizations and provocateurs. The entrepreneur recently reinstated a number of major accounts originally banned for various speech infractions, including former president Trump, Kathy Griffin, and Jordan Peterson.
Roth was intimately involved in the effort to censor the New York Post’s exclusive stories on Hunter Biden’s shady foreign business dealings ahead of the 2020 election. Twitter prevented users from sharing the story publicly and from privately messaging the link to other users. Mainstream publications, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, later confirmed the authenticity of much of the content derived from the computer, which was abandoned at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019.
Roth’s comments came a few days before Musk’s first drop of “The Twitter Files,” a collection of internal documents showcasing the scale and detail of the old management’s campaign to inhibit access to the Hunter Biden revelation. In one jaw-dropping email sent days before the 2020 election, which was reviewed by journalist Matt Taibbi, the “Biden team” demanded that Twitter scrub scandalous information about Hunter Biden from the site, including pornographic images he took of himself that leaked from the laptop.
