Yoel Roth
Yoel Roth
Yoel Roth (born in 1987) is an American Head of Site Integrity at Twitter and social media personality. Yoel is from San Francisco, California and he leads 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.[1][11][14][18]
Education
Yoel Roth received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. He also obtained BA. in Political science, Film and media studies at Swarthmore College.[1][13]
Marital Life
Yoel Roth is a happily married man who tied the knot with his husband whose name is not reviewed on social media. Their wedding ceremony was a private affair held in the presence of friends & family.
Yoel shared the news in Twitter on August 17th, 2019.
Yoel Roth shared the picture of them at a San Francisco City Hall and wrote on the news,
“we got married!
And San Francisco City Hall is really, really beautiful.”
On July 31, 2017, the couple shared a picture and captioned
“Sunset at Cannon Beach.”
Career
Yoel Roth began his career at Apple Inc. in May 2008 to August 2011 where he worked as Genius and he fixed Macs.
Yoel Roth worked as a researcher, Dangerous Speech Project at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, where he developed and implemented protocols for collecting and evaluating large data sets studying online hate speech from August 2014 to June 2015.[17]
Then, he joined Twitter in July 2015 and worked as Product Trust Partner since Feb. 2017.
Later, he went on to work as Sr. Product Trust Partner, Manager, Trust & Safety, Sr. Mgr., Trust & Safety, and currently, Head of Site integrity.
Yoel Roth research and teaching focused on the intersecting dynamics of privacy, safety and self-expression in online dating apps.
Yoel is not a top executive at Twitter hut he is the company's "head of site integrity," making him one member of the company's broad team dedicated to enforcing Twitter's rules.
He works under Del Harvey, Twitter's vice president of trust and safety.
He's best-known for dealing with issues around bots and spam.[15]
Yoel’s Working Experience
Head of Site Integrity
Company Name: Twitter
Dates Employed: Jul. 2018 – Present
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Yoel lead Twitter’s global Site Integrity team, responsible for policy development, implementation, and investigations for spam, data privacy and security, information operations, election security, and misinformation.
He direct Twitter’s efforts to combat information operations and suspected state-backed activity.
Sr. Mgr., Trust & Safety
Dates Employed: Feb. 2019 – Present
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Yoel is a senior manager of Twitter's global API Policy, Spam Policy, Misinformation Policy, and Information Operations Investigations teams.
Manager, Trust & Safety
Dates Employed: Nov. 2017 – Feb. 2019
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Sr. Product Trust Partner
Dates Employed: Feb. 2017 – Nov. 2017
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
He worked as the embedded policy partner to Twitter’s product and engineering teams, implementing privacy-by-design and safety-by-design principles as part of all new product development at Twitter.
Product Trust Partner
Dates Employed: Jul. 2015 – Feb. 2017
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Researcher, Dangerous Speech Project
Company Name: Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
Dates Employed: Aug 2014 – Jun 2015
He developed and implemented protocols for collecting and evaluating large data sets studying online hate speech.
He also Trained research assistants in quantitative and qualitative social media data management and analysis.
Genius
Company Name: Apple
Dates Employed: May. 2008 – Aug. 2011
He Fixed Macs.
Trump supporter’s attacks Yoel Roth and Twitter Stood by him.
In May, 2020 , Yoel got involved in a controversy after US President threatened to shut them down.
Yoel Roth spearheaded the social media company’s new fact-checking initiative that has been criticized by President Donald Trump.
The president has said that he will not allow fact-checking to “stifle” his freedom of speech.
The fact-checking initiative was announced in a blog post on Twitter’s website on May 11.
The blog was written by Yoel Roth and Twitter’s Director of Public Policy Nick Pickles.
According to that post, potentially misleading tweets are characterized in one of three ways: misleading information, disputed claims and unverified claims.
On "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday morning 27 May, 2020, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway read Yoel’s Twitter handle aloud and said
"Somebody in San Francisco go wake him up.
Tell him he's about to get more followers."
Yoel Roth has received more than 3,000 new followers over the past day, according to an analysis of his Twitter account.
He hasn't tweeted since Monday 25 May, 2020, but harassing messages are appearing every minute under his latest posts, and right-wing accounts with millions of followers, including the president's son and the Trump campaign's official account, have been tweeting out his name and personal information every hour since mid-Tuesday 26 May, 2020.
Yoel Roth replied for those who attacked him online by tweeting on May 25th, he wrote
“Somehow, regularly being told by internet strangers that l’m a soulless corporate shill is still less harsh feedback than l got from anonymous peer reviewers in my past academic life.”
Later, in an interview with National Public Radio’s Ari Shapiro, he said
“l think in 2020, we’re facing particularly divisive political moment here in the United States, and attempts to capitalize on those divisions amongst Americans seem to be where malicious actors are headed.”
Then, in the interview, Yoel Roth spoke about the use of Russian troll-farms during the 2016 and 2018 elections in the United States and said
Russian operatives were not solely responsible for the disinformation but that it was the work of a “wide range of malicious actors”
he said.
A Twitter spokesperson told Protocol that the company is standing behind Yoel Roth and does not have any plans to fire or suspend him.
"No one person at Twitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions,"
a Twitter spokesperson said,
"and it's unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for company decisions."
A person familiar with the matter said Yoel Roth has faced an explosion of death threats.
The storm began on Tuesday 26 May, 2020, when Twitter flagged a tweet from Trump as false, prompting conservatives and then Trump himself to lash out over allegations that Twitter was exhibiting bias against the president.
It's a familiar battle, and one that came only days after The Wall Street Journal reported that the president was considering convening panels devoted to unearthing "anti-conservative" bias, a culture war known to fire up the GOP's base during election seasons.
"Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct,"
Trump tweeted on Wednesday morning (27 May 2020).
"Big action to follow!"
Twitter confirmed that Roth was one of many voices within the company that helped make the decision to fact-check Trump.
But it was not his call alone, Twitter said — it was made by the broader
"trust and safety"
team.
It was the first time Twitter has appended its "misinformation" label to a tweet from Trump after years of pressure to do so, and it underscored the impossible question that companies like Twitter have found themselves facing in the Trump era: Should social media sites fact-check the president when he uses his enormous platform to spread falsehoods?
Roth, who has been at Twitter for more than four years and comes from an academic background, was almost immediately thrust into the center of that debate.
Jon Levine, a reporter with the New York Post who is popular among conservatives, on Tuesday tweeted screenshots of Roth's tweets about Republicans from 2017.
In one tweet, Roth called Mitch McConnell "a personality-free bag of farts."
In another, he wrote there were "actual Nazis in the White House."
The tweets took on a life of their own, bolstered by an article published on Fox News, promotions from the Trump-friendly One America News Network, and Conway's attack on "Fox & Friends."
By Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump Jr. had retweeted the post to his 5 million followers, writing,
"This joker is in charge of 'Site Integrity?' Could you possibly find someone more biased?"
The Trump 2020 campaign's official account responded to a tweet from the president, likely in a bid to get more eyeballs on their message:
"Yoel Roth is the Twitter employee in charge of 'developing and enforcing Twitter's rules' and he has a history of tweeting terrible and vile things that show he has a very bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)!"
Twitter said Roth is continuing to work despite the barrage of death threats and harassment he is facing.
The company declined to comment on whether it has assigned a security detail to his home.
Trivia
Yoel Roth likes traveling, music, playing video games, and playing sports.