Twitter’s former Global Head of Trust and Safety is under scrutiny for past comments in which he appeared to question the age at which youth can consent to sexual activity. Following the public resignation of Yoel Roth, who had worked for the social media giant for seven years, netizens began circulating his PhD thesis – which argues that minors under the age of 18 should be able to access applications for adults.
On December 10, Twitter CEO Elon Musk caused waves after sharing a screenshot from Roth’s PhD thesis which appeared to imply that minors should be permitted to use Grindr, an application used by adult gay men to facilitate sexual encounters.
“It’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18,” reads Roth’s thesis, which was titled “Gay Data” and submitted in 2016 at the University of Pennsylvania.
Musk’s tweet was in response to human trafficking survivor and vocal anti-trafficking advocate Eliza Bleu. Bleu has been drawing attention to instances of child sex trafficking that have occurred on or been facilitated through the Twitter platform.
Bleu highlighted a 2010 tweet from Roth which posed the question, “Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?” Roth included a link to a Salon article titled, “Student-teacher sex: When is it OK?”
The article details the case of a former high school teacher in Washington state who had sexual relations with a student in the days leading up to her graduation. Matthew Hirschfelder, then 33, was charged with first degree sexual misconduct with a minor, though the female student was 18 at the time.
The court’s ruling in Hirschfelder’s case reads, “That the legislature saw fit to criminalize sex between school employees and high school students — even those who reach the age of majority while registered as students — is a policy choice that recognizes the special position of trust and authority teachers hold over their students.”
The Salon piece boosted by Roth on his Twitter contests this statement and appears to advocate for sexual encounters between teenagers and adults: “The ruling essentially recasts all registered students between the age of 16 and 21 as incapable of consenting to sex.” The article concludes by agreeing with the sole dissenting judge in the court case, who asserted that the majority opinion cautioning against teacher-student sex “does not, ultimately, make sense.”
Roth operated a personal blog until very recently, when the same URL began to host a very bland profile of himself displaying nothing more than his Twitter feed and his upcoming speaking engagements. In his earliest posts, he complains about dating apps, STDs, and being labelled a “slut” by friends.
“Being sexually active for a number of years, this was by no means my first HIV test, but it was the first that triggered anything other than a temporary sense of relief; I felt, somehow, vindicated, as if karmically, all my previous choices had been validated by writ of not having ‘won’ the STI roulette,” Roth wrote in a 2010 post titled “Slut.”
In addition to his own blog, Roth wrote on other platforms.
In 2016, shortly after the release of his PhD thesis on Grindr, Roth penned a Medium post in which he admitted to maliciously investigating and releasing personal details on the identity of an anonymous man he had seen on Grindr, doxing him for no discernible reason.
“One afternoon, a new profile showed up, listed a few hundred feet away,” Roth wrote, explaining he had been browsing the dating app one afternoon looking for a match. “The profile picture showed a white guy in a Swarthmore basketball uniform, head cropped out of the frame, with a single letter listed as his name.”
He continued: “… For no reason except boredom and prurience and a mild, irrational dislike for athletes left over from high school, I made it my mission to discover the mystery basketball player’s true identity.” Roth then explained that he went on to publicly post “steps” that would lead any user to discover this person’s identity.
“Fortunately, I had the decency not to post his name; but I posted enough that anyone sufficiently interested could follow my steps. Mission accomplished.”
He added that his PhD thesis was inspired by this experience, and that having exposed the man’s personal information was not necessarily “wrong” or something he should actually have felt bad about.
“I went on to write an entire dissertation about privacy, safety, and identity on Grindr, to try to deal with my guilt for an afternoon of college stupidity, targeted at someone I’d never even met, for doing something that wasn’t shameful or wrong or really remarkable at all.”
Roth has a long history of sexually-charged tweets, and appeared to frequently bring pornographic paraphernalia and visuals into professional and public spaces.
In 2014, Roth tweeted out a link to a 34th Street submission titled “Sharing Semen.” While the post was submitted under an anonymous byline, Roth’s accompanying Tweet suggested he may have been responsible for the post.
The controversy surrounding Roth comes just as concerns regarding Twitter’s historical moderation process have once again been thrust into the spotlight.
Advocates have raised alarms for years on both the facilitation of sex trafficking and the widespread distribution of child sexual exploitation materials which have taken place on the platform. Twitter’s response has routinely been labelled inadequate, if not outright dismissive.
Earlier this year, Twitter scrapped plans to launch a subscription-based adult content service inspired by OnlyFans after a team of 84 employees suggested it would allow exploitative materials to further flourish on the platform.
“Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale,” concluded the Twitter team, which found that the company lacked the ability to verify users’ ages.
Since Elon Musk took over the company, internal information regarding political censorship carried out by top-ranking Twitter personnel has been intentionally revealed to the public. Musk handed over documents to a select group of journalists, who have collaborated on a project known as “The Twitter Files.”
In the second installment, journalist Bari Weiss authored a break-down of censorship methods used by leading staff members, including Roth, such as the utilization of blacklists designed to limit the visibility of user viewpoints that employees disliked.
One such notable account, @libsoftiktok, frequently shares videos of trans activists taken from TikTok accounts. The account’s owner, Chaya Raichik, is critical of drag queen events for children and opposes the teaching of gender identity ideology in schools.
Despite Twitter personnel internally admitting that Raichik had “not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy,” her account has been suspended six times in 2022 alone on the basis of “hateful conduct.”
Beyond the accounts directly named in the recent revelations from The Twitter Files, many users have taken the information as an admission of widely shared speculation on the biased and ineffective ways Twitter has moderated content.
Users who oppose gender ideology on the platform have asserted they are disproportionately targeted by the moderation system, which they say favors mainstream political viewpoints.
Sam Barber has maintained a running list of over 400 “gender critical” women who have been suspended or penalized by Twitter, most of whom posted relatively benign comments. Barber often juxtaposes those Tweets against far more violent and abusive messages posted by pro-gender ideology users which Twitter often refuses to take action on.
In November, a convicted child murderer began making accounts on Twitter to harass Reduxx writers and supporters. Synthia China Blast, who was recently discharged from parole after serving 25 years in prison, utilized photos of Reduxx contributor Jennifer Gingrich and Editor-in-Chief Anna Slatz, and posted threatening and sexual comments about them. Blast had targeted Reduxx following an October 24 report on his parole status.
Users who reported Blast’s accounts in an effort to have him removed from the platform often reported that Twitter found “no violations” in his content. In contrast, Gingrich received a temporary ban from the platform after responding to Blast and condemning his harassment campaign.
But the inconsistency in moderation was perhaps most dramatically exposed last year, after a survivor of child sexual abuse filed a lawsuit against Twitter alleging that the platform refused to take down widely shared pornographic images and videos of his abuse because it did not violate the company’s policies.
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