YOEL ROTH – Tom's Blog

President expected to issue executive order on social media imminently

May 28, 2020

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has defended his platform’s decision to fact-check US President Donald Trump for the first time ever over his comments on the upcoming election.

A spat erupted between Twitter and Donald Trump, one of the platform’s most prolific users, after Twitter said that two of his posts could be misleading.

The President accused the social media giant of harbouring an anti-conservative bias, a sentiment that was fuelled by unearthed anti-Trump tweets from Twitter’s head of site integrity.

Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter in 2006, wrote that the site chose to put a fact-check warning on two of Trump’s tweets because they may “mislead people into thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot.”

What happened to Trump’s tweets?

Trump in the tweets accused the Democrat governor of California, without evidence, of sending vote-by-mail ballots to “anyone living on the state, no matter who they are or how they got there” and warned of rampant voter fraud in the November election.

The tweets were tagged with a fact-check label that redirects to reporting by media and journalists debunking Trump’s claim. The President in response accused Twitter of suppressing free speech and interfering in the election. He also threatened to “strongly regulate” or shut down social media platforms outright.

The controversy is likely to raise further questions as to whether Twitter is willing to continue to append the label to other presidential tweets that have been considered false by third parties.

Donald Trump has recently doubled down on unsupported claims that former Rep. Joe Scarborough was involved in the 2001 death of his staffer, which was ruled accidental by authorities. Twitter said it would not fact-check these tweets, because they did not violate its policies, and would not remove them despite a request from the staffer’s widower.

A rebuke from Facebook

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose platform refuses to fact-check political speech and leaves it up to the media, challenged Twitter’s misinformation policy.

“We have a different policy than, I think, Twitter on this,” he said in a Fox News interview on Wednesday. “I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.”

Referencing Zuckerberg’s remark, Dorsey tweeted that fact-checking politicians “does not make us an ‘arbiter of truth’.”

He added: “Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions.”

Lacking integrity?

Twitter has come under fire among conservatives over its perceived bias against Donald Trump. One argument that fuelled that sentiment was a series of derogatory tweets about Republicans which Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, posted in 2016 and 2017.

The tweets referred to Trump as a “racist tangerine” and to his administration as “Nazis in the White House.”

Twitter, however, stood by Roth and explained that he was not the person who decided to fact-check Trump. “No one person at Twitter is responsible for our policies,” the company said in a statement to several news outlets. “It’s unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for company decisions.”

Dorsey tweeted: “Fact check: there is someone ultimately accountable for our actions as a company, and that’s me. Please leave our employees out of this. We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make.”

But you can trust him to be impartial.

27 May, 2020

Paul Joseph Watson

After Twitter announced it would start ‘fact-checking’ President Trump’s tweets, it was revealed that the head of ‘site integrity’ at the social media giant thinks everyone who voted for Trump is racist and that there are “actual Nazis in the White House.”

After California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order to ensure all voters will receive mail ballots for the election in November, Trump warned in a tweet, “Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged and even illegally printed out and fraudulently signed.”

Twitter then slapped several Trump tweets with a warning label that asserted, “there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud,” citing CNN and the Washington Post.

The warning also highlighted numerous tweets from blue check mark leftists claiming Trump was wrong. As we document, most of these individuals are obsessed with Trump and spend virtually every day hyperventilating about him on Twitter – hardly the “neutral” source one could rely on to provide a ‘fact check’.

This prompted Trump to later tweet, “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.”

It has now emerged that Twitter’s “head of site integrity,” Joel Roth, the leader of the team responsible for developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules, is a hardcore anti-Trump leftist.

“I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason,” he tweeted in November 2016.

Roth also claimed that there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE,” something that probably wouldn’t stand up to a ‘fact check’.

He also compared White House counselor Kellyanne Conway to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Roth has been head of site integrity at Twitter since July 2018 and is responsible for “election security” and “misinformation,” meaning he almost certainly played a key role in the decision to ‘fact-check’ Trump’s tweets.

In the meantime, We await Twitter ‘fact-checking’ false claims about ‘Russian collusion’ or any other of the erroneous issues pushed by the blue check mark brigade that have proven to be spectacularly wrong.

Don’t hold your breath.