Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) accused Yoel Roth, the gay man who formerly oversaw Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, of supporting pedophilia during a House Oversight Committee hearing that was originally meant to discuss Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post’s October 2020 article on the contents of a laptop belonging to non-politician and son of the President Hunter Biden,
Greene criticized Roth’s “inability to remove child porn” during his time as an executive at the microblogging platform.
Greene: “You permanently banned my Twitter account, but you allowed child porn all over Twitter, 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?“ (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.”
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.
Greene also went off on an anti-LGBT triade: 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.
“Despite all their mentioning of the First Amendment, they have not even made any sort of legal or legislative argument as to what the tie here is behind a personal grievance,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told The Hill.
The one real bombshell that did come out is that Twitter officials revealed on Wednesday stated that former President Donald Trump not only received preferential treatment for years, but he also directly requested the site remove tweets that he didn’t like. At the same time, they also noted that President Joe Biden hadn’t contacted Twitter to take down any tweets or censor content.
“Despite all their mentioning of the First Amendment, they have not even made any sort of legal or legislative argument as to what the tie here is behind a personal grievance,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told The Hill. “The Republican side is not even making any sort of request, no matter how partisan it is, about what the course of action, what we’re even doing here is. Why is the Oversight Committee even relevant to Twitter’s content moderation policies? she said calling the hearing an “embarrassment” and “abuse of public resources.