When Twitter launched in social media’s early days (it was 2006 when Jack Dorsey sent out the first tweet) most journalists scoffed at the idea of living by 140-character soundbites. But it quickly became the reporter’s go-to, according to the Pew Research Center. It took a while for the dark side to emerge.
Consider the story of Yoel Roth, a 37-year-old who was the head of “trust and safety” at Twitter in 2020. Writing in the New York Times last September, Roth described what happened when he decided the president’s tweets needed to be fact-checked.
“In the spring of 2020, after years of internal debate,” he wrote, “my team decided that Twitter should apply a label to a tweet of then-President Trump’s that asserted that voting by mail is fraud-prone, and that the coming election would be ‘rigged.’ ”
The label read: “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.”
The next day, Roth was the target of a coordinated attack. White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway publicly named him, and Trump tweeted that Roth was “a hater.” Online harassers called for him to be fired, jailed, or killed. Roth hired armed guards, went into hiding, and moved repeatedly.
“What happened to me wasn’t an accident,” Roth wrote. “It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me but all of us.” Those threats, he says, have had huge effects on what people see online. Researchers and tech workers are increasingly targeted by “lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks,” Roth wrote, curtailing efforts to quantify “abusive and misleading information spreading online.”
The 2016 election was supposed to be a “wake-up call about the role of social media in politics,” investigative journalist Julia Angwin wrote in the New York Times last week. The spread of disinformation online, abetted by the Russians, helped elect Trump, but it also spurred the creation of new monitoring systems and university-based research centers ahead of the 2020 election, she wrote. The new tools made it possible for journalists to track the spread of fake news across platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Those efforts have mostly been shut down, wrote Angwin, “amid pressure from lawsuits and a Republican congressional inquiry that alleged that the disinformation research was part of a government censorship conspiracy.” The tech giants themselves are now sabotaging the research by blocking access to the tools that make it possible.
Roth quit his job at Twitter after Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022, and he wrote about his experiences. Musk attacked him, falsely claiming that Roth, who is gay, condoned pedophilia. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene amplified those lies, telling Fox News that he “allowed child porn to proliferate on Twitter.” Again overwhelmed by threats, Roth and his husband sold their home and moved.
These attacks “come at a moment when the stakes for democracy could not be higher,” Roth said. “We should be worried about what happens next.”
