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Twitter's former trust and safety chief said it was a mistake to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story: 'We didn't know what to believe'
Business Insider ^ | 11/30/22 | Kelsey Vlamis

Posted on 12/02/2022 2:41:51 PM PST by Libloather

The former head of trust and safety at Twitter said it was a mistake for the platform to censor a story about Hunter Biden's laptop ahead of the 2020 election.

Yoel Roth, who resigned from Twitter following Elon Musk's takeover, was interviewed Tuesday by journalist Kara Swisher in his first public appearance since his departure from the company on November 10.

In October 2020, less than a month before the election, the New York Post published a story that claimed to contain emails retrieved from a laptop that belonged to President Joe Biden's son Hunter. Twitter initially suppressed distribution of the story, citing concerns that it could be the result of a foreign disinformation campaign.

Twitter quickly backtracked on its response, with then-CEO Jack Dorsey calling the decision to block the link "unacceptable." Other news outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, later confirmed the validity of the laptop's contents long after the election.

Some came to blame Roth specifically for censoring the story, a charge he denied in the interview with Swisher.

"It's widely reported that I personally directed the suppression of the Hunter Biden story. That is not true. It is absolutely, unequivocally untrue," Roth said, adding that the story did set off some of his alarm bells regarding disinformation.

"We didn't know what to believe. We didn't know what was true. There was smoke," he said. "Ultimately for me, it didn't reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter."

(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet; Conspiracy; History
KEYWORDS: biden; hunter; laptop; twitter
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To: blackdog

Exactly they didn’t care to know and did not try to verify anything. Took Bidens cronies word and spread their lie.


21 posted on 12/02/2022 3:42:59 PM PST by pas
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To: Libloather

They didn’t know, so they didn’t show. That don’t fly.


22 posted on 12/02/2022 4:01:46 PM PST by robel
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To: pas

It was clear to these unnecessary clowns which courses of action would not threaten their cushy jobs, which, when they would have been done competently would have required far more hard work, tough choices and moral character.


23 posted on 12/02/2022 5:11:57 PM PST by rx
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To: Libloather

They suppressed the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop in order to help Biden in the election but had no problems with allowing the false Russian collusion story from Hillary Clinton’s campaign to be spread for two years unchallenged.


24 posted on 12/02/2022 5:59:34 PM PST by GaryCrow
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To: Libloather

The problem is that Twitter is a “town square” monopoly run by hippies and Indians that hate America. The world is not served well by monopolies. Why cant patriots form monopolies and ban liberals? Why are conservatives so bad at media in general?


25 posted on 12/02/2022 6:34:19 PM PST by jroehl (And how we burned in the camps later - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago)
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