By The FirstFormer Head of Trust & Safety at Twitter Yoel Roth is admitting that it was a mistake for Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden Laptop story.
Roth, who left Twitter in the middle of November, was responsible for developing, maintaining, and enforcing Twitter’s user, content, and security policies. As the Twitter Files investigations have come to show, Roth was involved in a number of controversial decisions including the suspension of former President Donald Trump’s account in 2021.
Watch Roth make his admission below:
“So, the morning of the Hunter Biden story in the New York Post happens–and it was weird,” Roth told moderator Kara Swisher. The former Twitter executive went on to say that details of the story like the “laptop repair guy” and the story’s overall “uncertainty” had “set off alarm bells” for him, but never made him believe the story should be censored.
“There was smoke and ultimately for me it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter,” Roth said, adding that although it set off his “alarm bells” it “didn’t get there” for him.
Yoel Roth isn’t the first Twitter executive to admit the censoring of the Hunter Biden Laptop story was a mistake. In March of 2021, then CEO Jack Dorsey told a congressional hearing on misinformation that blocking the story–and subsequently locking the New York Post out of its Twitter account–was a “total mistake.”
