Twitter executive and ex-safety chief Yoel Roth admitted late on Tuesday that the tech giant made a serious mistake censoring Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal, which broke just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
Roth was the head of “trust and safety” at Twitter until he quit as Elon Musk acquired the company. He has been vocally critical of Musk.
In his first public appearance since leaving, Roth was interviewed by journalist Kara Swisher and implied that he did not share responsibility for censoring the Hunter laptop story.
“We didn’t know what to believe, we didn’t know what was true, there was smoke — and ultimately for me, it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter,” he said during the interview at the Knight Foundation conference.
When asked directly if it was wrong for Twitter to block the Hunter Biden content from being shared, Roth said, “In my opinion, yes.”
Twitter CEO Elon Musk confirmed on Wednesday that the company did interfere in U.S. elections.
“The obvious reality, as long-time users know, is that Twitter has failed in trust & safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections,” Musk tweeted. “Twitter 2.0 will be far more effective, transparent and even-handed."
Musk tweeted on Monday that he will let the public know what happened with the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened,” said Musk.
Musk tweeted a few days prior that it is necessary to “restore public trust.”
On October 14, 2020, the New York Post broke the story, reporting that the laptop held copies of emails between Hunter and a Russian business executive, including offers of payment if Hunter would use his influence and clearly implying then presidential candidate Joe Biden’s involvement in overseas business.
After more than two years of denial and what appeared to be a blatant coverup, the mainstream media has admitted that Hunter’s laptop does, in fact, exist. Last week, CBS news “broke” the story nearly two years after it was public knowledge and was widely mocked.
In August of this year Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook also censored the Hunter Biden laptop story.
"When we take down something that we're not supposed to, that's the worst," Zuckerberg disclosed on the Joe Rogan podcast.
Zuckerberg told Rogan the decision was based on warnings from the FBI on misinformation during the 2020 presidential election.
On Wednesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was asked about Elon Musk.
"One human being should not be able to go into a dark room by himself and decide 'Oh, that person gets heard from, that person doesn’t,’” Warren retorted.
