CNN has reported that Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety, has been forced to flee his house due to an increase in violent threats made against him as part of an attack campaign spearheaded by new Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who has used his platform to spread dark allegations about Roth.
It’s unclear whether Musk is intentionally generating noise to increase Twitter’s user count or whether he truly believes his outlandish claims against Roth. In any case, Musk’s attacks are just another example of his increasingly unstable managerial decisions and a sobering story for any worker who now has his favor.
Roth, who resigned from the social media company in November, has faced violence in recent weeks as a result of the release of the “Twitter Files” — internal Twitter communications that expose illegal manipulations, censorship, crimes against election fairness, and violations of the US constitution, as new owner Musk has revealed through journalists such as Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.
Roth’s job entailed him working on banning political candidates from manipulating Biden’s win, including the censorship of then-President Donald Trump, despite doing nothing against Twitter policy.
On Monday, Bari Weiss shared a series of screenshots purportedly showing internal Twitter docs in which Roth and others discussed how to ban Trump’s account, with some employees querying why the former president’s tweets did not break the platform’s regulations.
Roth has been under fire since he was exposed. However, things went a little awry when over the weekend, Musk appeared to endorse a tweet accusing Roth of sympathizing with pedophilia, a frequent cliche employed to attack people online.
Musk’s tweets to tens of millions of followers have long motivated his supporters to bombard his targets with online threats. However, the stakes are much higher now that Musk owns one of the world’s most influential social networks and has destroyed the division that previously policed online harassment.
