(Headline USA) The Twitter executive behind the company’s decision to censor the New York Post’s bombshell report about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 resigned this week.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, left the company on Thursday. It is unclear why he is leaving, since he was not one of the executives immediately ousted by owner Elon Musk.
In 2020, Roth was the social network’s head of so-called site integrity and made the call to restrict the sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop story. In a September 2020 testimony before the Federal Election Commission, Roth claimed this decision was due to “rumors” from the intelligence community that Hunter Biden had been hacked.
Musk defended Roth when he first took over the company, dismissing Roth’s “questionable” past tweets.
“I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted.
Roth’s “questionable” past tweets include derogatory remarks about former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
In November 2016, for example, Roth tweeted: “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”
In January 2017, he wrote, “Yes, that person in the pink hat is clearly a bigger threat to your brand of feminism than ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.”
Roth’s exit follows a number of other high-profile resignations from the company. Damien Kieran, chief privacy office, and Lea Kissner, chief information security officer, also quit this week.
Musk warned employees in an email that “bankruptcy” is a legitimate threat if advertisers continue to pull funding from Twitter.
“Sorry that this is my first email to the whole company, but there is no way to sugarcoat the message,” Musk wrote in a memo.
“Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn,” he wrote. “We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription.”
