A former Twitter executive, who was instrumental in the decision to ban President Donald Trump from the platform and censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, has finally come clean about the moves.
Yoel Roth, who was the head of Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” team, admitted that the decisions were a mistake.
Roth quit shortly after Musk’s purchase was complete and he took over as CEO.
In a new interview, Roth told Kara Swisher the company blew it when they restricted people from sharing the bombshell story.
Roth also denied he was responsible for the decision.
“It’s widely reported that I personally directed the suppression of the Hunter Biden story,” he said.
“That is not true. It is absolutely, unequivocally untrue.
“We didn’t know what to believe, we didn’t know what was true, there was smoke — and ultimately for me, it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter.
“But it set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 ‘hack and leak campaign’ alarm bells.”
Asked if it was a mistake for Twitter to have blocked the story, Roth said:
“In my opinion, yes.”
“It went off the rails in exactly the ways that we anticipated,” Roth said about the since delayed rollout of the new verification system by Elon Musk.
Roth also defended Musk and said the two have a good relationship.
Initially, Roth stayed on when Musk took over but he left after a couple of weeks.
When asked to give Musk some advice, Roth said:
“Humility goes a really long way,” he said.
“Humility goes a really long way” — Yoel Roth’s departing piece of advice to Elon Musk at the end of his @knightfdn program pic.twitter.com/Q0A9q7ooI8
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 29, 2022
Swisher excused the censorship on Twitter and inadvertently let the cat out of the bag when she said: “They were on alert from what happened in 2016 and all the hacked emails and things.”
The 2016 “disinformation” and the Russia Facebook story were duds. Had no impact.
News organizations always run stories on big leaks and they would have run the story on the DNC hack and what it contained whether there were social media platforms or not.
But blaming Russia and so-called “disinformation” allowed the Democrats and their allies to censor speech and control the narrative.
If you are a conservative or don’t follow the narrative, you get suppressed.
If you are a Democrat and obey the narrative, you can literally say anything and will not get banned or suppressed.
