Trump Targets Twitter Employee, Blaming Him for ‘Ridiculous’ Fact-Check Despite Site Saying He’s Not the Person Responsible
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President Donald Trump targeted an employee at Twitter as he continues to seethe (on Twitter) over the site’s new fact-checking mechanism that called out his false claims about mass fraud from mail-in voting.
“So ridiculous to see Twitter trying to make the case that Mail-In Ballots are not subject to FRAUD,” Trump tweeted — tagging Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity. “How stupid, there are examples, & cases, all over the place. Our election process will become badly tainted & a laughingstock all over the World. Tell that to your hater @yoyoel.”
So ridiculous to see Twitter trying to make the case that Mail-In Ballots are not subject to FRAUD. How stupid, there are examples, & cases, all over the place. Our election process will become badly tainted & a laughingstock all over the World. Tell that to your hater @yoyoel
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2020
Roth has been the target of Trumpworld’s anger ever since the social media service rolled out a fact-check on the president Tuesday night. The president’s defenders and friendly media outlets have taken notice of Roth’s derogatory past comments about Trump and other conservatives, so they’re blasting him, claiming he’s the site’s chief fact-checker, and holding him up as proof of Silicon Valley’s liberal bias.
Roth’s LinkedIn profile describes his role with the company as leading the teams “responsible for developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules on platform manipulation, spam, and API access, as well as Twitter’s investigation and attribution efforts related to state-backed information operations.” To put this in more simple terms, Roth’s job is to address issues on the site that involve bots, spam, and automated trolling.
For all of the vitriol that has been leveled at Roth, he’s not a member of Twitter’s top brass, and the social media company has defended him while pushing back on the false notion that he’s in charge of their fact-checking.
“No one person at Twitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions,” a Twitter spokesperson said to CNN, “and it’s unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for company decisions.”
As Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended his site’s new mechanism from the critiques of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, he seemed to implicitly denounce the harassment directed at Roth by saying he assumes ultimate accountability for the site’s decisions.
“Fact check: there is someone ultimately accountable for our actions as a company, and that’s me,” said Dorsey. “Please leave our employees out of this. We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make.”
Fact check: there is someone ultimately accountable for our actions as a company, and that’s me. Please leave our employees out of this. We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make.
— jack (@jack) May 28, 2020
Per our Civic Integrity policy (https://t.co/uQ0AoPtoCm), the tweets yesterday may mislead people into thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot (only registered voters receive ballots). We’re updating the link on @realDonaldTrump’s tweet to make this more clear.
— jack (@jack) May 28, 2020
Trump has yet to produce the examples he claims to have which will prove that mail-in voting facilitates widespread corruption. The president has used mail-in voting in the past, as did White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who was pressed on that by Fox News.
