Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) accused Yoel Roth, the gay man who formerly oversaw Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, of supporting pedophilia.
Greene made her comments during a House Oversight Committee hearing that was ostensibly meant to discuss Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post’s October 2020 article on the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of then-presidential nominee Joe Biden. Conservatives baselessly claimed that Roth and other Twitter employees suppressed the article at the request of Democrats to aid Biden’s presidential campaign.
During the hearing with Twitter executives, Greene criticized Roth’s “inability to remove child porn” during his time as an executive at the microblogging platform. Greene said that Twitter’s current owner Elon Musk banned 44,000 child pornography accounts after he took over the social media platform in October 2022.
“You permanently banned my Twitter account, but you allowed child porn all over Twitter,” Greene told Roth, referencing her 2022 ban for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Musk reinstated her personal account in November 2022.
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Greene also told Roth, “Now here’s something that disgusts me about you and your doctoral dissertation entitled ‘Gay Data.’ You argued that minors should have access to Grindr – an adult, male gay hookup app. Minors. Really?“
Her comment is a gross distortion of what Roth’s 300-page 2016 dissertation actually said. In it, he wrote that Grindr and other adult-only social media networks should possibly rethink their purposes and policies to better protect minors’ safety since underage users will always try to join age-restricted platforms even if they’re not allowed to.
In December 2022, Musk also posted 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,” The Guardian reported.
“Those are the consequences for this type of online harassment and speech,” Roth said. He also disagreed with the claim that Twitter suppressed the Post’s story at the request of the Biden campaign. He said separate Twitter teams work directly with political campaigns, and that no such request ever crossed his desk.
Greene used the congressional hearing to air her usual anti-LGBTQ+ views.
Earlier in the hearing, she incorrectly claimed that, by banning her account, Twitter interfered with people’s right to vote and violated her First Amendment rights. But the First Amendment only forbids the government from curtailing an individual’s free speech; the amendment doesn’t require private companies to host content that violates its policies.
Greene also claimed that Twitter has been “silencing” parents concerned about educators teaching “gender lies” at their schools and “biological males entering their daughters’ bathrooms and sports.” She provided no proof to back up her claims of such views being banned from the platform.
Though Greene was recently given a seat on the House Oversight Committee, in 2021, she lost all of her House committee assignments for her social media posts supporting various conspiracy theories and supporting violence against Democratic leaders.
Greene’s previous social media posts said that an airplane never hit the Pentagon during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; that school shootings are fake; that California wildfires were started by a Jewish-owned space laser; and that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once sliced off a child’s face and wore it.
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) criticized the congressional hearing.
“We’re wasting our time here bullying former Twitter employees,” he said, according to The Hill. “It’s calling the refs, so that way in the future when they want disinformation to be put on the internet, social media companies will be scared to call them out down the road.”
