Marjorie Taylor Greene accuses gay former Twitter executive Yoel Roth of sexualising children
Marjorie Taylor Greene is well known for posting anti-trans views on social media. (YouTube/PBSNewsHour)
Marjorie Taylor Greene showed her anti-LGBTQ+ hand yet again when she alleged Twitter’s previous head of safety condones the sexualisation of children.
Greene’s vile remarks were made as House Republicans on Wednesday (8 February) heard testimony from former Twitter executives into what the lawmakers characterised as the social media platform’s alleged ‘suppression’ in the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The House Oversight Committee grilled the former high-ranking Twitter executives about the platform’s handling of reporting in 2020 about the alleged contents of a laptop owned by the president’s son in which Twitter blocked users from tweeting and direct messaging about it.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, was among those questioned during the hearing.
Roth testified that he had to sell his home after the release of the “Twitter Files” – a set of internal Twitter documents made public back in December by CEO Elon Musk. In these documents, Musk directly targeted Roth and claimed he condoned the sexualisation of children because of and out-of-context part of his PhD thesis.
Greene jumped on the implication that Roth was sexualising children in his thesis because there was a paragraph in his dissertation where he acknowledged under-18s use Grindr despite the app being for users aged 18 and above.
“Let’s talk about something a little bit further,” Greene said. “It’s amazing to me, Mr Roth, as the head and trust of safety at Twitter, your ability or should I say inability to remove child porn.”
She continued: “Here’s something that disgusts me about you and your doctoral dissertation titled ‘Gay Data’. You argued that minors should have access to Grindr – an adult, male gay hookup app – minors really?
“You know, Elon Musk took over Twitter, and he banned 44,000 accounts that were promoting child porn. You permanently banned my Twitter account, but you allowed child porn all over Twitter.”
Twitter confirmed in January 2022 that Greene’s personal account was banned from the social media platform for spreading COVID-19 misinformation, a breach of Twitter’s policies. Musk, who bought Twitter in October, later reinstated her account.
The far-right Georgia Republican uses her social media accounts to repeatedly attack LGBTQ+ people and allies as well as spew anti-trans rhetoric.
Roth testified about the horrific impacts the proliferation of the “lie”, spread by Musk and now Marjorie Taylor Greene, about his doctoral thesis had on him. He said it led directly to a “wave of homophobic and antisemitic attacks” against him of which “Twitter has removed vanishingly little”.
Roth added Twitter employees worldwide were also doxed, leaving them vulnerable to attacks.
