More than two years after The Post’s October 2020 exposé on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop was published, the former Twitter executive and safety chief who was instrumental in its censorship has admitted that he made a mistake.
This comes as his former employer, Elon Musk, acknowledged on Wednesday that the social media giant “has interfered in elections.”
Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth, who left his position in November after Elon Musk’s $44 billion buyout, said on Tuesday that the firm made a mistake by preventing users from sharing information.
In an interview with writer Kara Swisher, Roth made an effort to disassociate himself from the situation by adamantly maintaining that while he had doubts about the validity of the first son’s device, those doubts never reached the point where he believed the tale should be kept quiet.
In an interview at the Knight Foundation conference, Roth stated, “We didn’t know what to trust, we didn’t know what was accurate, there was smoke — and ultimately for me, it didn’t reach a position where I felt comfortable deleting this information from Twitter.”
He said, using another moniker for the Russian cybercrime organization Fancy Bear: “But it set off every single one of my perfectly calibrated APT28 ‘hack and leak campaign’ warning bells.
When asked if she thought Twitter made a mistake by preventing the article from being spread, Roth said, “In my perspective, yeah.”
Yoel Roth, a former executive at Twitter and head of safety, said it was a mistake to conceal Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop.
Roth insisted during a conversation with writer Kara Swisher that he never reached the conclusion that the information regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop should be kept quiet.
Musk, Twitter’s new CEO, reacted on Wednesday to a dig from Roth, who said “no” in response to Swisher’s question about whether he still thought site safety had improved under the new leadership.
The millionaire from South Africa claimed, “The plain fact, as long-time users know, is that Twitter has failed in trust & safety for a very long time and has intervened in elections.” “Twitter 2.0 will be a lot more efficient, open, and fair.”
The billionaire made his remarks in response to a user who called Roth’s old “trust and safety” team a “disgrace” and said he had no business criticizing how Musk is currently handling the business.
During a congressional hearing on misinformation and social media in March of last year, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO at the time of the censoring, previously acknowledged that suppressing The Post’s piece was a “complete error.”
