Last Updated on December 10, 2022
The former head of trust and safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, was called out by then-President, Donald Trump, for election interference, censorship, and narrative control in a 2020 press conference at the White House.
“This is the arbiter, this guy, he’s the arbiter of what’s supposed to go on Twitter. He’s the one,” Trump said. “He uses CNN as a guide. CNN, which is fake news. He uses CNN as a guide. His name is Yoel Roth”
But, when they send out, like in California [for example], millions and millions of ballots to anyone that's breathing. Anybody in California that's breathing gets a ballot," Trump said.
— Addy Adds (@OneAddyAdds) December 10, 2022
“And he’s the one that said that, ‘mail-in balloting,’ is [okay],” Trump added. “Mail-in? No fraud? Really? Why didn’t you take a look all over the country? There’s [court] cases all over the country.”
“If we went to mail-in balloting, our elections, all over the world would look as a total joke. It would be a total joke. There’s such fraud and abuse, and you know about harvesting where they harvest the ballots and they go and grab them and they go to people’s houses and then they say ‘sign here.’ No. It doesn’t work [that way],” Trump said at the time.
“But an absentee ballot, [because] you can’t be there or you’re sick and you go and register and you do all sort of things to get that ballot and there’s good security measures. But, when they send out, like in California [for example], millions and millions of ballots to anyone that’s breathing. Anybody in California that’s breathing gets a ballot,” Trump said.
“Here’s your man, [Yoel Roth]. And that’s on Twitter,” the former president added.
Roth has been in the news since it was revealed that he regularly met with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to discuss content moderation and narrative control on Twitter.
Independent investigative journalist, Matt Taibbi, released another batch of The Twitter Files on Saturday.
“After J6, internal Slacks show Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies. Here’s Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth, lamenting a lack of ‘generic enough’ calendar descriptions to [conceal] his ‘very interesting’ meeting partners,” Taibbi said.
Before the company opted to ban Trump from Twitter, content moderation officials began to add “warning” labels to many of his tweets. For example, on December 10th, 2020, a messaged revealed that “Twitter executives announced a new ‘1.3 deamplification’ “tool” which limited users from being able to share tweets by America’s 45th president.