Head of Twitter’s fact checking has a history of anti-Trump tweets

The head of Twitter’s fact-checking team has previously tweeted that the Trump administration are Nazis, compared adviser Kellyanne Conway to Joseph Goebbels and said fly over states are racist.

The previous tweets from Yoel Roth, whose official title at Twitter is head of Site Integrity, emerged after the social media giant put a fact-checking warning on Trump’s posts for the first time on Tuesday. 

Twitter prompted readers to check the facts in Trump’s tweets after the president suggested that California’s mail-in balloting initiative would lead to substantial voter fraud in the November general election. 

The social media giant said fact checkers had debunked the president’s claims about mail-in ballots being ‘substantially fraudulent’.  

It has since emerged that Roth, who is in charge of the team that investigates misinformation, has a history of posting anti-Trump tweets. 

Prior tweets from Yoel Roth, whose official title at Twitter is head of Site Integrity, emerged after the social media giant put a fact-checking warning on Trump’s posts for the first time on Tuesday

Roth referred to the Trump administration as ‘actual Nazis in the White House’ in a January 2017 tweet and tweeted in November 2016 that fly over states were racist.

He also compared Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to Nazi Joseph Goebbels saying: ”Today on Meet The Press, we’re speaking with Joseph Goebbels about the first 100 days…’ – What I hear whenever Kellyanne is on a news show.’

The majority of Roth’s tweets criticizing Trump and his administration were posted around 2017. 

Roth started working at Twitter in 2015 as a product trust partner, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

He has been in his current role as head of site integrity for almost two years.  

Trump has long accused Twitter of being biased and he lashed out at the company in response to the fact-checking warning put on his posts, accusing it – in a tweet – of interfering in the 2020 presidential election. 

‘Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!’ he said. 

Roth referred to the Trump administration as ‘actual Nazis in the White House’ in a January 2017 tweet

Roth tweeted in November 2016 that fly over states were racist

He also compared Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to Nazi Joseph Goebbels in a 2017 tweet

Trump, who has more than 80 million Twitter followers, had claimed in tweets earlier in the day that mail-in ballots would be ‘substantially fraudulent’ and result in a ‘rigged election.’ 

He also singled out the governor of California over the issue, although the state is not the only one to use mail-in ballots.

Hours later, Twitter posted a blue exclamation mark alert underneath those tweets, prompting readers to ‘get the facts about mail-in ballots’ and directing them to a page with information aggregated by Twitter staffers about the claims.

A headline at the top of the page stated ‘Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud,’ and was followed by a ‘what you need to know’ section addressing three specific claims made in the tweets. 

Trump posted the same text about mail-in ballots on his official Facebook page, where the post picked up 170,000 reactions and was shared 17,000 times. 

Facebook’s policy is to remove content that misrepresents methods of voting or voter registration, but in this case it left the post untouched. 

President Donald Trump tweeted his accusations on Tuesday night that the social media site was interfering in the 2020 presidential election by fact-checking his tweets 

 

It came after the President’s claims were ‘fact-checked’. Users who clicked on the blue exclamation marks were sent to a page that explained why the claim was unsubstantiated, including that there was ‘no evidence’ that vote-by-mail was linked to voter fraud