Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, has posted multiple tweets deriding people who voted for President Trump, his staff, and other Republicans.
Roth’s responsibilities at Twitter include “election security and misinformation,” a role he has held since 2018. Roth compared Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and likened the Trump administration to Nazis. He also attacked people who live in “fly over” states, saying, “we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.” The Twitter executive also used his timeline to attack Sen. Mitch McConnell, referring to him as a “bag of farts.”
In 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey explained that Twitter’s “No. 1 priority within elections and conversations on the elections is making sure we’re protecting the integrity of the conversation.” He has also banned paid political advertising on Twitter and has been public about his goal of eliminating misinformation on the site.
Trump’s tweets about election integrity were flagged by Twitter as false, with links below the tweets leading to a page with the title, “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud” above links to news articles.
The president accused the social networking platform of interfering in the 2020 election.
….living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
A spokesperson for Twitter did not deny that Roth played a part in the decision to add a label to Trump’s tweets and told the Washington Examiner that “it’s unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for company decisions.”
