If Yoel Roth Is Harmed, Should Elon Musk Face Hate Crime Charges?

For no reason Elon Musk suggested gay former Twitter employee  Yoel Roth sexualized Kids. Roth is now in hiding fearful for his life.

Last Saturday, Musk intentionally misrepresented a portion of the employee’s doctoral thesis, saying it advocated for “children being able to access adult Internet services.”

If nothing else it was on out-of-context page excerpt from Roth’s 300-page doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the actual excerpt, Roth concludes that Grindr isn’t “a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers,” but because young queer people use the platform anyway, it “should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases.”

Nowhere in the dissertation does Roth advocate for the sexualization of children, but spreading the false claim that LGBTQ+ people are sexual predators who are “grooming” children has become a popular smear tactic for right-wing hatemongers, particularly after Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law went into effect in August. This is the exact kind of misinformation that’s led to devastating real-life instances of violence against queer and trans people throughout 2022.

Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter resigned in November, just two weeks after Musk officially took over the company.

“Even as [Musk] criticizes the capriciousness of platform policies, he perpetuates the same lack of legitimacy through his impulsive changes and tweet-length pronouncements about Twitter’s rules,” Roth penned in an essay upon his departure. “In appointing himself ‘chief twit,’ Mr. Musk has made clear that at the end of the day, he’ll be the one calling the shots.”

Now, Roth is claiming that Musk’s mentions of his involvement in information suppression and other matters have caused him to fear for his life, and has fled his home after receiving a multitude of threats.

Roth has been the target of attacks online since Musk began unveiling the “Twitter Files,” a set supposed excerpts from internal communications that Musk has been releasing with the help of right-wing journalists Matt Taibibi and Bari Weiss. On Monday, Weiss tweeted a screenshots that appear to show internal Twitter communications in which Roth and others deliberate whether to ban Donald Trump’s account.

“Watching Elon launch a digital mob against his former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, an openly gay Jewish man, is one of the most vile and disgusting things I’ve ever seen,” Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, tweeted on Saturday. “He’s putting Yoel’s life in danger and he knows it. It’s sick, twisted, and sociopathic.”

Watching Elon launch a digital mob against his former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, an openly gay Jewish man, is one of the most vile and disgusting things I’ve ever seen. He’s putting Yoel’s life in danger and he knows it. It’s sick, twisted, and sociopathic. pic.twitter.com/eOR6Kt9zuS

— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) December 11, 2022

Musk has expressed his indifference to white supremacy and Nazi ideology repeatedly and it’s no stretch to say that Musk was fully aware that he was putting this former employee’s life in danger.