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Yoel Roth is Twitter’s head of site integrity. Roth spearheaded the social media company’s new fact-checking initiative that has been criticized by President Donald Trump. The president has said that he won’t allow fact-checking to “stifle” his freedom of speech.
The fact-checking initiative was announced during a blog post on Twitter’s website on May 11. The blog was written by Roth and Twitter’s Director of Public Policy Nick Pickles. consistent with that post, potentially misleading tweets are characterized in one among three ways: misleading information, disputed claims and unverified claims.
According to his official website, Roth began performing at Twitter as an intern in 2014.
Heavy has reached bent Roth for discuss this story.
Here’s what you would like to know:
1. Kellyanne Conway Accused Roth of ‘Constantly Attacking Trump Voters’
In an appearance on Fox & Friends on Fox News on the morning of May 27, Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway mentioned Roth twice by name. Conway also spelled out Roth’s Twitter handle. Conway added, “Somebody in San Francisco go wake him up and tell him he’s close to get more followers.”
Conway went on, “This guy is consistently attacking Trump voters, Trump, Mitch McConnell, you name it.” Conway also said, “It’s horrible the way [Roth] looks at people.”
On his LinkedIn page, Roth’s role at Twitter is described as:
He leads the teams liable for developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules on platform manipulation, spam, and API access, also as Twitter’s investigation and attribution efforts associated with state-backed information operations.
Roth told students at his school , Swarthmore College, in 2017 that his role at Twitter included working with product managers on new products also as protecting Twitter’s data information.
2. Roth Mocked those that Have Attacked Him Online by Joking That His College Evaluations Were Harsher
In a tweet on May 25, Roth mocked those that have attacked him on social media. Roth tweeted, “Somehow, regularly being told by internet strangers that I’m a soulless corporate shill remains less harsh feedback than I got from anonymous peer reviewers in my past academic life.”
According to Roth’s Twitter profile, he features a Ph.D. from The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. before that, Roth studied politics at Swarthmore College. consistent with his website, Roth’s dissertation at The Annenberg School was on “Gay Data.” Roth has described his area of study as focusing “on the privacy and self-expression choices of gay men using geosocial networking services like Grindr.”
3. Roth Said That in 2020 Americans face a ‘Particularly Divisive Political Moment’
In March 2020, Roth was interviewed by National Public Radio’s Ari Shapiro. Roth spoke about his role in fighting “election disinformation.” He said, “I think in 2020, we’re facing a very divisive political moment here within the us , and attempts to maximize those divisions amongst Americans seem to be where malicious actors are headed.”
Roth said Russian operatives weren’t solely liable for the disinformation but that it had been the work of a “wide range of malicious actors.” Roth did speak within the interview about the utilization of Russian troll-farms during the 2016 and 2018 elections within the us . Roth said that following the 2016 election, Twitter found that multiple accounts belonged to “inauthentic personas.” Roth said, “We’ve seen some indication that that is still a part of the Russian playbook.”
4. Roth’s Ph.D. addressed the ‘Intersection of Technology & Sexuality’
Roth said in an interview on the University of Pennsylvania website that much of the work he did for his Ph.D. was about the “intersection of technology and sexuality.” Roth said that, “I’m particularly curious about how things like masculinity are constructed both in and thru technology.” Roth added, “Most of my interests are within the construction of gay masculinity.” Roth said he was tracking how “notions of masculinity” had changed since the gay rights movement began.
Roth said within the same interview that his original plan when he began studying at The Annenberg School was to review video games. Roth said that after learning about how communications encompassed many of his interests, “video games went out the window.” Roth also said that the “beauty of Annenberg is that no-one here really knows what communications means.”
5. within the Wake of the 2016 Presidential Election, Roth Tweeted: ‘I’m Just Saying, We Fly Over Those States That Voted for a Racist Tangerine for a Reason’
In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, Roth tweeted, “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.” Roth also tweeted that he donated $100 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Roth said that the rationale for the donation was because, “We can’t f*** around anymore.”
In another message, Roth mentioned Senate legislator Mitch McConnell as a “personality-free bag of farts.”
Roth said in January 2017 that there have been “actual Nazis within the White House.”
Twitter exec in charge of effort to fact-check Trump has history of anti-Trump posts, called McConnell a ‘bag of farts’
Twitter’s “Head of Site Integrity” Yoel Roth boasts on his LinkedIn that he is in charge of “developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules,” like the one that led Twitter to slap a new “misleading” warning label on two of President Trump’s tweets concerning mail-in balloting on Tuesday.
However, Roth’s own barrage of anti-Trump, politically charged tweets seemingly calls into question whether he should be creating guidelines for the president and other Twitter users, especially when Twitter is under fire for its alleged left-wing bias. Commentators have argued that Trump’s tweets on the risks of mail-in voting were not misleading, and the president accused Twitter of seeking to “interfere” in the upcoming election under the guise of a supposedly neutral “fact-checking” policy.
Roth has previously referred to Trump and his team as “ACTUAL NAZIS,” mocked Trump supporters by saying that “we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason,” and called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a “personality-free bag of farts.” (Last August, Twitter suspended McConnell’s Twitter account, prompting the GOP to threaten to cut off advertising on the site until Twitter relented.)
In September 2016, Roth tweeted, “I’ve never donated to a presidential campaign before, but I just gave $100 to Hillary for America. We can’t fu-k around anymore.”
When Trump won the November 2016 election, Roth dejectedly chalked the development up to “[Bernie] Sanders protest voters, and racism,” before sounding more optimistic notes.
“I’m almost ready to stop dwelling on how my friends are complicit in the election of Donald Trump,” he said on Jan. 7, 2017. “Almost.”
“Massive anti-Trump protest headed up Valencia St,” Roth wrote on Jan. 20, 2017, followed by a “heart” emoji and the words “San Francisco.”
In response to this story, Twitter spokesperson told Fox News: “No one person at Twitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions, and it’s unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for company decisions.”
Twitter separately linked Fox News to a post from communications VP Brandon Borrman: “No one person here is responsible for our polices or enforcement actions. People who decide to target one person for decisions they don’t agree with know damn well what they’re doing.”
Twitter declined to elaborate as to why Roth’s apparent biases were not relevant given what he has acknowledged is a leading role in deciding how to flag certain discourse on the platform.
Indeed, Roth sometimes opened up about his heart, and apparent political bias, on Twitter. “‘Every time a cute boy uses an Android phone, I die inside’ is the new ‘Every time a cute boy tells me he’s a Republican, I die inside,'” he said in 2011.
“I occasionally worry that my mother WASN’T joking all those times she told us she was voting Republican,” he wrote in 2012.
For the most part, though, Roth urged his followers to unite, especially after Trump’s inauguration.
“The ‘you are not the right kind of feminist’ backlash to yesterday’s marches has begun,” Roth wrote on Jan. 22, 2017. “Did we learn nothing from this election?”
Also on Jan. 22, 2017, Roth compared senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Exacerbating matters, Roth previously authored a slew of posts bluntly referring to what he calls “trannies.” In 2010, he wrote: “It wouldn’t be a trip to New York without at least one big scary tranny.” In 2012, he tweeted: “A 10 block cab ride can seem so much longer when the driver tells you about that time he thought a tranny hooker was a ‘real girl.'”
“Tranny hookers in Birkenstocks. Philadelphia: a city of contradictions,” he mused on July 24, 2011. “All the fags took him to heart,” Roth wrote on March 21, 2009, referring to Christian Siriano of “Project Runway” fame.
When another user criticized his language, Roth held his ground. “Trans is a category worth being linguistically destabilized in the same way we did gay with ‘fag,'” he wrote. “Sorry, but I don’t subscribe to PC passing the buck. Identity politics is for everyone.”
Yoel says on his personal website that he received his PhD in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania by “studying privacy and safety on gay social networks.”
“These are the kids that are fact checking the President of the United States,” remarked Heather Champion, a commentator on social media. Several of Roth’s tweets were first resurfaced by The New York Post’s Jon Levine early Wednesday morning.
Roth’s most polemical and political posts, which do not carry any warning label, were under extra scrutiny as Trump accused Twitter of “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” by again acting out of apparent left-wing bias. The president vowed to take unspecified action. On Wednesday morning, Trump threatened to “strongly regulate” or “close down” social media platforms that “silence conservatives’ voices.”
The episode began early Tuesday when, Trump wrote: “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mailboxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone 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!!”
Within hours, Twitter then appended an unprecedented label to the bottom of the tweet reading, “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” Clicking that label brings readers to a paragraph reading in part: “Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud. … Fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.”
TRUMP CAMP FIRES BACK AFTER TWITTER LABELS ITS VIDEO ‘MANIPULATED MEDIA’
Twitter’s warning label was placed on Trump’s tweets even though a Twitter spokesperson acknowledged to Fox News that Trump’s tweet had not broken any of the platform’s rules, and despite the fact that several experts have called mail-in balloting an invitation to widespread fraud, as Trump said in his tweets.
Indeed, bipartisan panels of experts, as well as journalists, have found that absentee balloting increases the risk of voter fraud.
“Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud,” read the conclusion of a bipartisan 2005 report authored by the Commission on Federal Election Reform, which was chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker.
“Twitter ‘fact-checkers’ really suck,” wrote Dan Bongino, a Fox News contributor. He linked to a 2012 article in The New York Times headlined, “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises.” The article states that “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.”
A Twitter thread Tuesday by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany highlighted numerous recent stories documenting fraud concerns over mail-in ballots across the country, including a Fox News piece.
“Literally nothing has convinced me of the threat to election integrity posed by mail-in ballots so much as Twitter and other media furiously insisting you can’t talk about it at all and working so hard to suppress the discussion of its (completely obvious) risks,” wrote The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, who is also a Fox News contributor.
The brouhaha erupted just two months after Twitter flagged a video uploaded by the Trump campaign as “manipulated media,” only to rebuff the campaign’s efforts to have the platform flag a similar video uploaded by the Biden team.
In March, Roth sat for an interview with NPR, in which he emphasized that he was working to combat “election disinformation.”
“I think in 2020, we’re facing a particularly divisive political moment here in the United States, and attempts to capitalize on those divisions amongst Americans seem to be where malicious actors are headed,” Roth said. “This is a similar pattern to what we saw in 2016 and 2018, but one of the things that we’ve seen from not only Russia but a wide range of malicious actors is an attempt to capitalize on some of the major domestic voices that are participating in these conversations and then double down on some of those activities.”
On May 25, Roth took a seemingly cavalier attitude towards criticism, tweeting, “Somehow, regularly being told by internet strangers that I’m a soulless corporate shill is still less harsh feedback than I got from anonymous peer reviewers in my past academic life.”
The Trump campaign, however, was less amused.
“We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters,” Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement. “Partnering with the biased fake news media ‘fact checkers’ is only a smoke screen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility. There are many reasons the Trump campaign pulled all our advertising from Twitter months ago, and their clear political bias is one of them.“
And late Tuesday, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, noted on Twitter that “The law still protects social media companies like @Twitter because they are considered forums not publishers. But if they have now decided to exercise an editorial role like a publisher then they should no longer be shielded from liability & treated as publishers under the law.”
That was a reference to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which broadly protects online content platforms from liability. For example, a defamatory comment posted by a Twitter user would not ordinarily lead to liability for Twitter, even if the platform allows the defamatory content to remain online after becoming aware of it.
Calls to reform the law have largely gone unheeded in recent years, even as sites like Twitter take on a more dominant role in national discourse. (Copyright law, which has a strong constitutional foundation, ordinarily does require sites like Twitter to remove offending content, or face liability.)
Reaction to Twitter’s actions among commentators was almost uniformly negative. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto pointed out that Twitter hadn’t fact-checked Trump’s charge that the platform was interfering improperly in the election. “Hmm, no fact check on this so I guess it must be true!” he wrote.
Others observed that Twitter had not fact-checked a false claim on police shooting statistics that was shared by New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“It wouldn’t be a trip to New York without at least one big scary tranny.”
— Twitter “Head of Site Integrity” Yoel Roth
Separately, GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel wrote that Alabama’s secretary of state, John Merrill, told CNN earlier in the day that five of the six voter fraud convictions during his tenure related to absentee balloting.
In a post retweeted by the Trump campaign, The Daily Caller’s Logan Hall noted that Twitter has not appended a warning label on tweets from Chinese government representatives engaging in a propaganda campaign to blame the U.S. for the spread of coronavirus. “The deeper problem: many of the big tech companies that people hold near and dear to their hearts have no actual allegiance to America or American values,” Hall wrote.
“Wow,” wrote Michael James Coudrey, the CEO of Yuko Social, a social media engine for politicians and organizations. “Look what Twitter is doing to the President of the United States [sic] tweets. They are attaching a link then saying according to CNN and Washington Post, what he is saying is unsubstantiated. This is insane.”
NADLER IN 2004: PAPER BALLOTS SUSCEPTIBLE TO FRAUD
President Donald Trump speaks during a Memorial Day ceremony at Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine, Monday, May 25, 2020, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
A Twitter spokesperson told Fox News earlier Tuesday that Trump’s tweets “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots,” and that “this decision is in line with the approach we shared earlier this month.”
Twitter acknowledged Trump’s tweet “is not in violation of the Twitter Rules as it does not directly try to dissuade people from voting — it does, however, contain misleading information about the voting process, specifically mail-in ballots, and we’re offering more context to the public.”
TWITTER REBUFFS TRUMP TEAM EFFORT TO HAVE BIDEN VIDEO LABELED MISLEADING — AFTER IT LABELED TRUMP VIDEO DECEPTIVE
Twitter did not respond to Fox News’ inquiries about whether consideration was given for The Washington Post or CNN’s political leanings, or why its warning label appeared to be contradictory — saying both that there was “no evidence” that mail-in balloting leads to fraud, and at the same time, that there was indeed evidence that mail-in balloting had been linked to fraud, although only “very rarely.”
However, Republicans have long argued that many states fail to adequately clean up their voter rolls. Last year, California was forced to remove 1.5 million ineligible voters after a court settlement last year when California’s rolls showed a registration of 112 percent.
And, data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission indicates that roughly 28 million mail-in ballots have disappeared in the past decade.
“Elections in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 saw more than 28.3 million ‘unaccounted for’ mail ballots,” a report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) recently assessed.
“Putting the election in the hands of the United States Postal Service would be a catastrophe. Over the recent decade, there were 28 million missing and misdirected ballots,” PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams said in a statement. “These represent 28 million opportunities for someone to cheat. Absentee ballot fraud is the most common; the most expensive to investigate; and can never be reversed after an election. The status quo was already bad for mail balloting. The proposed emergency fix is worse.”
Election integrity has become one of the upcoming election’s most prominent issues. On May 20, Trump threatened to withhold federal funds from Michigan if it pursued mail-in balloting — a questionably constitutional move, given general prohibitions against the federal government forcing state action on matters ordinarily within states’ jurisdiction.
“Michigan sends absentee ballot applications to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election,” Trump wrote. “This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State. I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!”
The Republican National Committee (RNC) earlier this month launched ProtectTheVote.com, a digital platform that the GOP says is part of its all-hands-on-deck effort to “protect against the Democrats’ assault on our elections” as progressives push for sweeping changes, including vote-by-mail and more ballot harvesting, amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The launch came after the RNC and Trump campaign doubled their legal budget to $20 million after an initial commitment of $10 million in February, saying they wanted to “fight frivolous Democrat lawsuits and uphold the integrity of the elections process.”
That was a message echoed by Trump in a tweet last month: “GET RID OF BALLOT HARVESTING, IT IS RAMPANT WITH FRAUD. THE USA MUST HAVE VOTER I.D., THE ONLY WAY TO GET AN HONEST COUNT!”
Suspicion of big tech has reached a critical mass in recent months. Also on Tuesday, Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey discovered that YouTube was censoring comments critical of the Chinese government. YouTube called the censorship a mistake, but offered no details; Republicans, in turn, sought a closer look.
“Is Project Dragonfly going global?” wrote Indiana Republican Rep. Jim Banks, referring to Google’s since-scrapped search engine that would have censored results to appease the Chinese government. “Google must stop imitating #CCP censorship practices now
Head of Twitter’s ‘site integrity’ in charge of fact-checking Trump has previously tweeted the administration are Nazis, compared Kellyanne Conway to Joseph Goebbels and said fly over states are racist
- The head of Twitter’s fact-checking team, Yoel Roth, has a history of anti-Trump tweets
- Roth’s prior tweets, which were mostly posted around 2017, emerged after Twitter put a fact-checking warning on Trump’s posts on Tuesday
- Twitter prompted readers to check the facts in Trump’s tweets
- Trump has long accused Twitter of being biased and he lashed out at the company in response to the fact-checking warning
- He accused Twitter of interfering in the 2020 presidential election and stifling free speech
- Trump on Wednesday threatened to close down social media platforms after Twitter labelled two of his tweets ‘unsubstantiated’
- His tweets that were labeled unsubstantiated related to claims about mail-in ballots being ‘substantially fraudulent’
The head of Twitter’s fact-checking team has previously tweeted that the Trump administration are Nazis, compared adviser Kellyanne Conway to Joseph Goebbels and said fly over states are racist.
Yoel Roth, whose official title at Twitter is head of Site Integrity, faced backlash on Wednesday after his history of anti-Trump tweets emerged less than 24 hours after the social media giant put a fact-checking warning on two of the president’s tweets.
Twitter prompted readers to check the facts in Trump’s tweets after the president on Tuesday suggested that California’s mail-in balloting initiative would lead to substantial voter fraud in the November general election.
The social media giant said Trump’s claims about mail-in ballots being ‘substantially fraudulent’ were found to unsubstantiated by fact-checkers at CNN, the Washington Post and other media outlets.
It is the first time Twitter has taken such action against Trump with the company previously resisting calls to censure the president.
Following the move, previous tweets from Roth – who is in charge of the team that investigates misinformation at Twitter – resurfaced, including one in which he suggest the Trump administration were Nazis.
In a January 2017 tweet, Roth referred to the Trump administration as ‘actual Nazis in the White House’ and tweeted in November 2016 that fly over states were racist.
He also compared Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to Nazi Joseph Goebbels saying: ”Today on Meet The Press, we’re speaking with Joseph Goebbels about the first 100 days…’ – What I hear whenever Kellyanne is on a news show.’
The majority of Roth’s tweets criticizing Trump and his administration were posted around 2017.
Roth started working at Twitter in 2015 as a product trust partner, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He has been in his current role as head of site integrity for almost two years.
Conway, who is a counselor to Trump, lashed out at Roth in an interview with Fox & Friends on Wednesday and went as far as giving out his Twitter handle on live television.
‘This guy is constantly attacking Trump voters, Trump, Mitch McConnell, you name it. He’s the head of integrity at Twitter,’ Conway said.
‘It’s horrible the way he looks at people who should otherwise have a free and clear platform on Twitter.’
Trump has long accused Twitter of being biased and on Wednesday threatened to close down social media platforms as a result of the warning put on his tweets.
‘Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen,’ he tweeted on Wednesday.
It followed on from previous tweets late Tuesday in which he also lashed out at the company, accusing Twitter of interfering in the 2020 presidential election.
‘Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!’ he said.
Trump, who has more than 80 million Twitter followers, had claimed in tweets earlier in the day that mail-in ballots would be ‘substantially fraudulent’ and result in a ‘rigged election.’
He also singled out the governor of California over the issue, although the state is not the only one to use mail-in ballots.
Hours later, Twitter posted a blue exclamation mark alert underneath two of those tweets, prompting readers to ‘get the facts about mail-in ballots’ and directing them to a page with information aggregated by Twitter staffers about the claims.
A headline at the top of the page stated ‘Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud’ and was followed by a ‘what you need to know’ section addressing three specific claims made in the tweets.
The claims were found to unsubstantiated by fact-checkers at CNN, the Washington Post and other media outlets, according to Twitter.
The information aggregated by Twitter included experts pointing out that mail-in voting is rarely linked to fraud and that mail-in ballots are used in states other than California. It also provided links to media outlets debunking Trump’s claims.
It is not yet clear who is in charge of aggregating the information included on the Twitter page.
In a statement, Twitter said that Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting did not violate the company’s rules because they didn’t discourage people from voting.
But Trump’s vote-by-mail tweets contained ‘potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots’.
Twitter said the application of a fact-checking label to Trump’s tweets was an extension of its new ‘misleading information’ policy, introduced earlier this month to combat misinformation about the coronavirus.
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