Donald Trump Targets Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity, Says US Elections Will Be A ‘Laughingstock’
On Thursday, May 28, U.S. President Donald Trump took to Twitter to call out the site’s head of integrity, Yoel Roth, and once again mention his belief that mail-in votes will cause election fraud.
Trump tweeted about the “substantially fraudulent” mail-in ballots on May 26, discussing California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s directive to send ballots to every registered voter in the state. The president claimed that “mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.” For the first time ever, Twitter tagged his tweets as factually incorrect, including a link to “get the facts about mail-in ballots” underneath the two-part post.
This has led to significant backlash from Trump about social media and the First Amendment, with the president tweeting later that day that Twitter is “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and “stifling FREE SPEECH.”
Now, Trump is threatening to revise the Communications Decency Act of 1996, per CNN. Section 230 of this act essentially protects tech companies who run and moderate their own platforms from being sued. The president has drafted an executive order that will be released on Thursday to help curtail these protections, thus opening up tech companies to liability for political bias and not acting in “good faith.”
In a precursor to this executive order, Trump took to Twitter once again, this time to specifically call out Roth, who is the head of Twitter’s site integrity, bashing the platform for stating that mail-in ballots will not cause election fraud. In his tweet, he even went so far as to say the election process will become “badly tainted & a laughingstock all over the World.”
This has also led to a renewed clash between Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO. Both companies compete in the same space and thus have engaged in rivalry over many things, but the question of whether or not to fact check information seems to have caused a resurgence in the differences between the two companies, CNN reported in a different article.
On Wednesday, Zuckerberg appeared on Fox News to state that his company has a “different policy” than Twitter when it comes to fact-checking. He stated he did not think Facebook should be the “arbiter of truth of everything people say online.”
For his part, Dorsey said he did not think that adding a fact-check label to tweets made Twitter an “arbiter of truth.” Rather, he said it was their responsibility to be transparent and give people the information to “connect the dots” and “judge for themselves.” He also wrote in a tweet on Wednesday that Twitter’s decision to start fact-checking was his own and not the responsibility of any of his employees, who should not be targeted for the act, something Trump seemed to have ignored when he tagged Roth in his Thursday post.
