Yoel Roth is a senior employee of the social media company Twitter. His title is “Head of Site Integrity,” a position which involves developing policies related to spam blocking and data protection, as well as the site’s practice of selective censorship and narrative shaping, particularly when it comes to topics such as politics and elections. Roth joined the company in 2015, starting out at the company’s “trust and safety” team and moving up the ranks, eventually becoming the director of the team as well as the company’s “site integrity” lead. Before he started working for Twitter, Roth spent a year as a researcher at Harvard University. There, he studied controversial online rhetoric, which he has previously referred to as “hate speech.” ¹

Roth has been open about his support for the Democratic Party and his disdain for those with right-of-center views while working on Twitter’s moderation and censorship features. During the 2016 presidential election, he donated to the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Following the election of Donald Trump, Roth mocked the parts of the country that had voted for him, claiming that people “fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.” When Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, Roth also claimed that there were now “actual Nazis in the White House.” ²

Education and Career

Yoel Roth received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Swarthmore College and a doctorate in communication from the University of Pennsylvania. Between 2008 and 2011, he worked as an Apple computer repairman. In 2014, he took a researcher position at Harvard University’s Center for Internet and Society, where he developed methods to collect and evaluate alleged “hate speech” online. The following year, Roth joined Twitter as a junior member of its “trust and safety” team. By 2017, he was one of the team’s managers, and the year after that, he took charge of the company’s “site integrity” efforts, including artificial suppression of alleged “misinformation.” In 2020, he became the director of the trust and safety team while remaining in charge of site integrity. That year, Roth also joined the advisory board of the Observatory on Social Media, a project of Indiana University, and in 2021, he became a volunteer for the Aspen Institute, providing technical advice to the organization’s controversial Commission on Information Disorder. ³

Controversies

As the head of Twitter’s “integrity” activities, Yoel Roth oversaw the company’s move to begin labeling alleged misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election. When the site began targeting then-President Donald Trump’s posts expressing concern about potential ballot fraud, his advisor Kellyanne Conway criticized Roth in an appearance on Fox News, pointing out his track record of attacking Trump and Republican voters on his own Twitter profile. ⁴

Roth reportedly approved the decision to censor a New York Post report on leaked emails from the laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, which was released approximately one month before the 2020 election and showed evidence of alleged improper foreign business deals. ⁵ Roth claimed that the decision was justified and that the company censored the story after receiving advice from United States intelligence agencies. A group of right-of-center activists filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, arguing that Twitter’s move to censor the story provided support to the Biden campaign in a manner that violated election laws. However, the commission dismissed the complaint. ⁶

1. Yoel Roth. LinkedIn. Accessed May 8, 2022. https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoelroth/
2. Nelson, Steven, and Natalie Musumeci. “Twitter Fact-Checker Has History of Politically Charged Posts.” New York Post. New York Post, May 28, 2020. https://nypost.com/2020/05/27/twitter-fact-checker-has-history-of-politically-charged-posts/.
3. Yoel Roth. LinkedIn. Accessed May 8, 2022. https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoelroth/
4. Ron Kampeas. “Trump adviser attacks Twitter integrity chief Yoel Roth over fact-check.” The Jerusalem Post. May 28, 2020. Accessed May 8, 2022. https://www.jpost.com/american-politics/trump-adviser-attacks-twitter-integrity-chief-yoel-roth-over-fact-check-629563
5. ^[1] Ross, Chuck. “Meet the Conspiracy Theorist behind Twitter’s ‘Crisis Misinformation Policy’.” Washington Free Beacon, May 19, 2022. https://freebeacon.com/media/meet-the-conspiracy-theorist-behind-twitters-crisis-misinformation-policy/.
6. Katie Daviscourt. “Twitter censored Hunter Biden laptop stories after ‘rumors’ from US intelligence warned of ‘a hack-and-leak operation’ that would ‘involve’ him.” The Post Millenial. September 16, 2021. Accessed May 8, 2022.

   https://thepostmillennial.com/twitter-censored-hunter-biden-laptop-rumors-hack-and-leak/