The Twitter exec who censored noti.group’s reporting on Hunter Biden — and brazenly likened members of the Trump administration to Nazis — has quit just days after getting public support from new boss Elon Musk.
Yoel Roth, 35, had until Wednesday continued pushing the site’s shifting policies on trolling and hateful conduct — and appeared alongside new owner Musk, 51, in defending the platform in a crunch meeting with advertisers that same day.
But Twitter staffers were told on Slack on Thursday that Roth was the latest key exec to have resigned, according to employees.
Roth also confirmed his exit by changing his bio on the site he’d worked at for seven years to “Former Head of Trust & Safety at @Twitter.”
The long-contentious exec was just one of the latest key figures to join the exodus during the unprecedented crisis that Musk this week admitted could end in bankruptcy.
Damien Kieran changed his bio to “Ex-Chief Privacy Officer” after sharing a photo of him leaving behind his laptop and Twitter passes, calling it a “time honored tradition.”
Similarly, Lea Kissner changed her bio to “(now former)” chief information security officer, telling her 25,000 followers: “I’ve made the hard decision to leave Twitter.”
“Proud” Twitter Client Solutions Leader Robin Wheeler shot back at rumors she’d also quit, tweeting: “I’m still here.”
The exodus came as Musk has warned he will slash in half the site’s 7,500 staffing numbers, and after he fired then-Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and other top management as soon as he took charge.
Still, Roth’s exit was the biggest shock given how closely intertwined he appeared to be with Musk in sharing the site’s new policies.
Early in his takeover, Musk also defended Roth, dismissing his “questionable” past tweets while declaring: “I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.”
That support was in itself surprising given how Roth is blamed for censoring noti.group’s exclusive stories about Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings ahead of the 2020 presidential election, a ban Musk has ripped as “obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
He was also the subject of a 2020 front-page article in The Post that noted how the man policing the site’s content had referred to former President Donald Trump’s advisors as “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.” He also likened Trump’s spokesperson Kellyanne Conway to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
In other tweets dating back to 2016 and 2017, Roth dubbed Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell a “personality-free bag of farts,” bragged about his $100 donation to then-Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton and snidely remarked of the middle of the country: “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”
Former staffer Emily Horne, who oversaw global policy communications at Twitter until 2018, warned that Roth’s exit would be a “huge loss.”
“He’s worked incredibly hard under very challenging circumstances, including being personally targeted by some of the most vicious trolls who were active on the platform,” said Horne.
“He stayed through all of that because he believed so deeply in the work his team was doing to promote a public conversation and improve the health of that conversation.”
Edward Perez, Twitter’s former product director for civic integrity, which includes its election policies, shared a similar warning.
“While we cannot predict what might happen in the post-election period, I can imagine scenarios where ‘tough calls’ would have naturally made their way up to Yoel,” Perez told The Washington Post.
“Now of course it begs the question: who has sufficient institutional knowledge at this critical time?”
Still, despite the drama, Musk insisted early Friday that Twitter “hit all-time high of active users today.”
With Post wires
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
