The title of America’s Most Unpopular Jew belongs by long tradition to George Soros. In recent weeks, however, a pair of contenders for the 2022 award have arisen.
In last week’s report from the new Rome, I described Sam Bankman-Fried’s rapid descent from cryptocurrency boy-wonder to Bahamian jailbird.
Mr Bankman-Fried has now been extradited to the US and is home for the holidays on a $250 million bond. The story of Fried and FTX, his crypto exchange, will run into 2023. So will that of Yoel Roth.
Roth worked at Twitter from 2015 until his departure in early November, two weeks after Elon Musk completed his purchase of the company. Roth worked his way up from junior member of the Trust & Safety team to a senior Trust & Safety manager, and then, in 2018, Head of Site Integrity.
In 2020, Roth doubled up as Head of Trust & Safety. He became crucial to how Twitter responded to a series of challenges that amounted to a crisis of responsibility and credibility.
If you are lucky, you will have better things to do than waste time on Twitter. In a sense, Twitter is where the news that ends up on the TV or radio or news websites is made: it is where the stories are picked and the narratives shaped.
The site has become essential to the intertwined businesses of news, politics and entertainment. It has played a key role in their intertwining to the point that fact and fiction have become lifestyle choices in an online game whose currency is status.
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Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter (Photo by CARINA JOHANSEN/NTB/AFP via Getty Images)
This status is not just virtual. The release of company communications by Elon Musk confirms that the real-world rewards and penalties are considerable.
In recent weeks, Musk has given a series of journalists access to the company’s high-level internal communications.
The “Twitter Files” emails show how Roth and his minions deliberated on which accounts the algorithm should boost and which should be “shadow-banned”, their circulation deliberately reduced. Twitter had always denied that it favoured the left over the right. Its founder, Jack Dorsey, told a Congressional committee that it did not practise shadow-banning.
Further emails show Roth’s key role in Twitter suppressing the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop in the weeks before the 2020 elections, even though its top staff, Roth included, could find no reason to suppress it, and how, as Donald Trump promulgated ever-more elaborate allegations of a stolen election, senior executives decided to silence the account of a sitting president.
The most recent emails show that Twitter worked closely with an 80-person unit that the FBI set up to deal with Twitter and “disinformation”.
Matt Taibbi, one of the Twitter Files journalists, characterised the relationship as having a “master-canine quality”. The FBI sent lists of accounts it wanted Twitter to suspend or silence, and paid $3.4 million to Twitter, and Twitter complied immediately.
Some of the accounts were spreading malicious untruths about the 2020 presidential elections.
Others, though, were asking reasonable questions about the security of an electoral system in which each state sets its own rules, mail-in voting has suddenly become normal, digital voting systems have been shown to be unstable, and ballot-counting, unlike in every other Western democracy, can take days.
The FBI considered one user, Claire Foster, to be a threat to the integrity of America’s elections for tweeting a joke: “I’m a ballot counter in my state. If you’re not wearing a mask, I’m not counting your vote.”
The inability to tolerate mockery confirms the Orwellian nature of the collaboration between the FBI and Twitter. So does Twitter’s language of “integrity”, “trust” and “safety”. Welcome to 2023, everyone.
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor, a Washington Examiner columnist and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute
