Anti-Trump tweets by Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity since July 2018, are just the latest example of the extreme leftward slant and double standards held by those at the helm of Silicon Valley social media giants.
The New York Post’s Jon Levine resurfaced tweets written by Roth in 2016 and 2017, not only poking fun at conservative leaders but also mocking the Americans who make up the geographic majority of the country.
“I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voter for a racist tangerine for a reason,” the Twitter executive wrote the night of the 2016 election.
Roth called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a “bag of farts” in one tweet, and expressed fear over “actual nazis in the White House” in another.
“He leads the teams responsible for developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules” pic.twitter.com/OdBTqlInDZ
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) May 27, 2020
Roth is free to express his own political views of course, however biased they may be. But as Levine points out, Roth’s job description means he “leads the teams responsible for developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules.” It’s no secret that Roth and other social media enforcers have a left-leaning bent. That’s why it’s no surprise that we’re continuing to see increased pushback against and the silencing of conservative voices on social media.
Just yesterday, Twitter added a “fact check” alert to two tweets from President Trump for the first time, in which the president claimed that mail-in ballots would be “substantially fraudulent.”
There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
Trump responded by threatening to regulate or “close down” social media sites that “silence conservative voices.”
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. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020
Twitter employees have been found guilty conservative censorship attempts before. In November 2018, Twitter suspended Marine veteran and conservative commentator Jesse Kelly’s account, but refused to explain why. After online backlash, Twitter reinstated Kelly’s account.
Earlier in 2018, Project Veritas obtained undercover footage of Twitter employees boasting about using their positions to quietly block certain users’ posts from being seen. “One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control,” said a former Twitter software engineer in the clip. Accounts which have been “shadow banned,” he added, “just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it.”
In testimony before Congress, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey insisted that “Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions, whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules.” Yet, when asked by podcaster Sam Harris about Twitter’s suspension of certain accounts, Dorsey claimed, “I don’t believe that we can afford to take a neutral stance anymore,” according to the Daily Wire.
Twitter isn’t the first or the only member of the elite media class to show bias against conservatives. Two weeks ago, ABC, NBC, and CBS all ran clips of Trump administration officials that were edited in a way that misinformed viewers about the actual content of the videos.
Hollywood holds the same one-way bias. Ostracized circles of conservatives in the entertainment industry cluster in groups such as the “Friends of Abe,” which keeps the names of its 2,500 members private. Meanwhile, Tinseltown elites from Michelle Williams to the creators of Mrs. America advocate and celebrate the Leftist policies like abortion, and mischaracterize opponents of radical feminism.
Roth’s tweets about conservatives aren’t an isolated event; they represent the troika of Big Tech, media, and Hollywood in their determination to oppose conservative opinions.