by
Cnn
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The former head of trust and security at Twitter fled his home amid an escalation of threats stemming from Elon Musk’s criticism campaign against him, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.
Yoel Roth, who resigned from the social media company in November, has faced a storm of attacks and threats of violence in recent weeks following the release of the so-called “Twitter Files” – internal Twitter communications that new owner Musk released through journalists including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.
Roth’s position has involved him working on sensitive issues including suspending then-President Donald Trump’s account in 2021. On Monday, Weiss posted a series of screenshots purported to show internal Twitter documents in which Roth and others they debated whether to ban Trump’s account, with some employees questioning whether the former president’s tweets violated the platform’s policies.
While Musk had initially publicly supported Roth, that soon changed after he left the company.
Roth has since come under criticism and threats following the release of the Twitter Files. However, things took a dark turn over the weekend when Musk appeared to approve of a tweet falsely accusing Roth of sympathizing with pedophilia, a common trope used by conspiracy theorists to attack people online.
A person familiar with Roth’s situation told CNN that threats made against the former Twitter employee escalated after Musk engaged in the pedophilia conspiracy theory.
This isn’t the first time Roth has been in the public eye.
Tweets Roth posted in 2016 and 2017 that were critical of then-President Trump and his supporters were later surfaced and used to argue that Roth and Twitter were biased against the president.
Among Roth’s tweets was one he wrote on Election Day 2016 that read, “I’m just saying, let’s gloss over those states that voted for a racist Mandarin for a reason.”
Twitter defended Roth at the time, saying, “No one person on Twitter is accountable for our policies or enforcement actions, and it’s unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for business decisions.”
When Roth was still working Twitter in October, Musk was asked about Roth’s old tweets.
“We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My feeling is that he has high integrity and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted.
