A setback for the thought police

Since Elon Musk started releasing the “The Twitter Files,” we’ve learned a lot about the social media network’s controversial decisions right before the 2020 election to ban President Trump from the platform and censor reporting on President Biden’s corruption. However, when examining the critical decisions that resulted in Twitter’s procedural double standards, censorship, and election interference, it turns out understanding who was making these decisions is as important as learning how they were made.

This brings us to Yoel Roth, the former head of “Trust and Safety” at Twitter. Roth was the executive in charge of creating and enforcing Twitter’s policies for who got banned and shadowbanned and otherwise had their account restricted on the network. And if you were to imagine a right-wing caricature of an immoral censorious liberal, it would be hard to conjure up something more absurd than Roth.

He got his undergraduate degree at Swarthmore, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His doctoral thesis was on underage people who use gay sex apps, such as Grindr. While Roth doesn’t explicitly condone underage people using anonymous sex apps, he also says “we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as a loci for queer youth culture.” A perusal of his tweets over the years shows Roth took a particular glee from announcing his academic work involved studying sex. And he was quite open about the fact that he enjoyed gay pornography—and even had a second “secret dirty Twitter account” to discuss his enthusiasm for porn and sex.

As for Roth’s politics, after Trump was elected he tweeted his disgust that there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE” and compared Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to Goebbels. He called Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell “a bag of [gas].” And he didn’t spare any contempt for ordinary Republican voters, saying “we fly over the states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.” It almost goes without saying he donated money to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Perhaps there are some people out there that have strong opinions but can set them aside for the purposes of doing their job. Roth was not one of those people. It’s been well reported that Elon Musk purchased Twitter in part because he was incensed that the platform had banned the Christian satire site The Babylon Bee. The Bee’s offense was a satirical article declaring Rachel Levine, Biden’s transgender Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “Man of the Year.”

Roth, after being fired by Musk, sat down for an interview with tech journalist Kara Swisher, who asked him about his decision to ban the Babylon Bee from Twitter. He vociferously defended Twitter’s asinine policy that prohibited “misgendering” and attacked other Twitter accounts that are critical of trans ideology, such as Libs of TikTok.

But Roth went much further than that. “I want to start by acknowledging that the targeting and the victimization of the trans community on Twitter is very real, very life-threatening, and extraordinarily serious,” he said. In other words, not using someone’s preferred pronouns is tantamount to threatening that person’s life. But this isn’t about protecting anyone—forcing people to deny biological reality is just an attempt at thought control.

As for Roth’s politics, the Twitter files show internal communications demonstrating he was wildly inconsistent in how he treated Republicans and Democrats. When GOP Rep. Jody Hice tweeted, “Mailed ballots are more prone to fraud than in-person voting. That shouldn’t be controversial. It’s just common sense,” Roth ordered a “soft intervention” reducing the visibility of Hice’s tweet and appended a warning label to his tweet telling Twitter users “voting by mail is safe and secure.” However, being critical of voting by mail is a perfectly rational opinion. Hice’s statement about mail-in ballots being more prone to fraud has been confirmed by The New York Times, a joint CalTech-MIT study, and a report on voting coauthored by former Democratic president Jimmy Carter. Would Twitter to cancel them too? Of course not.

Meanwhile, other internal conversations show Roth and his team let a left-wing conspiracy about how Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett would work with Trump to steal the election flourish on the site because “that’s understandable.”

Roth also decided to take a warning label off a tweet by Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder, who spread an unhinged and easily disproven conspiracy that “it’s too late to use the mail” to vote in October of 2020 because the Postal Service had been “deliberately crippled” by Trump. According to Roth, the idea that Trump had crippled the Post Office to stop people from voting was “factually accurate.”

In the end, it’s hard to learn all this about Roth and not conclude that the people running Twitter, and the rest of America’s censorious tech companies for that matter, are exactly who we thought they were all along: overlords so self-righteous they can’t distinguish legitimate dissent from physical threats, think their views are infallible compared to elected representatives, and openly disdain voters from “flyover” country.

Our right to speak online should not restricted by political and cultural radicals willing to use every tool at their disposal to foist their views on Americans. So far, Elon Musk’s attempt to rescue Twitter from their clutches represents is a victory for free speech. At the very least, it’s a setback for the thought police.