The top architects of the west’s social media censorship regime continue to complain about the success of the ongoing pushback against their industry, spearheaded by GOP congressional investigations and the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit.
A clip that circulated on X, formerly known as Twitter, shows the former top censor of that platform, Yoel Roth, complaining that the “disinformation researchers,” whose work often provided the basis for the suppression of Republican and conservative voices online, have been forced onto the defensive by GOP efforts.
Roth, who as head of Twitter’s “trust and safety” department presided over the platform’s vast censorship apparatus, complained that disinformation researchers were now being “silenced” by Republican lawsuits.
“We’ve stopped having a conversation about the facts. We’ve stopped having a debate about which ideas are good, which ideas are bad. We’ve entered this phase where silencing people has become the de facto way to advance your interests,” said Roth.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former ‘Censor-in-Chief,’ renowned for censoring the Biden laptop story, President Trump, and the political right during the 2020 election, is now complaining that the right is censoring his censorship industry via lawsuits and congressional investigations.… pic.twitter.com/6Y1ZNPG41v
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) October 10, 2023
“Hundreds of university researchers, people who are not usually in the limelight… university researchers are now getting sued, and are subject to discovery in these lawsuits, and are having to turn over thousands of emails between them and their students, and about research projects, for ultimately frivolous and vexatious lawsuits about, I dunno, censorship or something.”
Roth’s interviewer, tech journalist Kara Swisher, also complained that her sources were starting to become more cautious.
“All the people I cover, who used to talk to me regularly, will not talk to me on the record,” complained Swisher.
Roth went on to claim that disinformation researchers “could never censor anybody,” despite the fact that academic organizations like the Election Integrity Partnership openly admitted to building tools for government actors to report “disinformation” accounts to social media platforms, boasting of a 34 percent success rate in censoring accounts.
“These are, to be clear, not people who could censor anybody on any social media platform,” claimed Roth.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.