Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) had a temper tantrum in Congress during a hearing about Twitter yesterday, where she accused a gay former Twitter employee of “shadow-banning” her account over “a freaking joke.”
“Did either of you approve a shadow-banning of my account, @LaurenBoebert?” Boebert asked former Twitter employees Yoel Roth and Vijaya Gadde at a House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday.
The hearing was ostensibly about Twitter allegedly suppressing a 2020 New York Post article about Hunter Biden, but many congressmembers used the hearing to air grievances against the social media platform. “Shadow banning” is a term for reducing the visibility and reach of an account on social media, usually without that account owner’s knowledge.
“No I did not,” Roth responded.
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“Not to the best of my recollection,” Gadde said.
“I know you looked at it because fascist Twitter 1.0 had a public interest exceptions policy, which means for members of Congress to be shadow-banned, it had to go before you, Mr. Roth,” Boebert snapped at them. “So, I’ll ask again. Did you shadow-ban my account, yes or no?”
He said “not to the best of my recollection,” to which Boebert responded: “So the answer is, Mr. Roth, yes you did!”
She claimed she heard from “Twitter staff” that Roth “suppressed” her account for a specific tweet about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“It’s a freaking joke about Hillary Clinton being angry that she couldn’t rig her election!” Boebert shouted. “It’s a joke! But in response, being the sinister overlords that you all are, you placed a 90-day account filter, so I could not be found!”
“Now who the hell do you think that you are? Election interference? Yeah, I would say that that was taking place because of you four sitting here.”
“This is fundamental to our nation’s governance and you all attacked that very foundation,” she said, referring to how visible her tweets allegedly were on the app’s search function.
“I’m not angry for myself,” she concluded. “I’m not angry because I was silenced.”
“I am angry for the millions of Americans who were silenced because of your decisions, because of your actions, because of your collusion with the federal government!”
Last year, Twitter CEO Elon Musk attacked Roth, posting a brief section of Roth’s thesis that mentioned Grindr and wrote, “Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services.” In December 2022, Musk also released internal Twitter records showing how the company initially suppressed the Post‘s Hunter Biden article.
Roth, who is gay and Jewish, told the congressional hearing that he faced “a wave of homophobic and antisemitic attacks” following Musk’s release of the records.
“Twitter has removed vanishingly little [of the attacks against me],” Roth said. “And following The Daily Mail’s decision to publish where I live, I had to leave my home and sell it.” He added that lower-level Twitter staff around the world, “had their families threatened and experienced harm equal to or greater than what I’ve experienced,”
