US Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene Falsely Accuses Out Gay Twitter Executive Of Sexualising Children

On Wednesday, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump Republican and conspiracy theorist, accused the out former Head of Trust and Safety for Twitter, Yoel Roth, of endorsing child sexualization.

During a Republican-led US House Oversight Committee hearing around Twitter’s removal of a New York Post Hunter Biden’s laptop story, Greene launched into the homophobic rant. 

Falsely Accuses Roth Of Supporting Child Porn

During the rant, she said, “Let’s talk about something a little bit further, 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. In 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.”

My goodness — Marjorie Taylor Greene smears Yoel Roth as a pedophile pic.twitter.com/8yyjS9k2nY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 8, 2023

Greene was reiterating Twitter owner Elon Musk incorrect accusation that Roth endorsed  “children being able to access adult Internet services,” in his doctorate thesis while at the University of Pennsylvania.  

Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis: pic.twitter.com/1NiBohjhMQ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2022

Roth: I Had To Leave My Home And Sell It

During the hearing Roth revealed the harassment he received after Musk’s tweet.

Roth said, “Elon Musk also made the decision to share a defamatory allegation that I support or condone pedophilia. And this lie led directly to a wave of homophobic and anti-semitic threats and harassment against me, of which Twitter has removed vanishingly little. 

“Following the Daily Mail‘s decision to publish where I live. Ultimately, I had to leave my home and sell it. Those are the consequences for this type of online harassment and speech.”

Yoel Roth says that after Elon Musk spread homophobic nonsense about him, he was flooded with so much harassment that he had to sell his house and move pic.twitter.com/kPanEXMala

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 8, 2023

In a section of his dissertation, which looked into safer alternative to dating apps for Queer youth, Roth explained that while Grindr is for users aged 18 and above, those under 18 still use the app.

Roth wrote, “the new medium of gay-targeted social networking may be a crucial social outlet for gay, bisexual, and questioning youth”

He then added, “Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers.

Roth goes on to write, “the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. 

“Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr – including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.”

Greene’s Twitter account was suspended in January 2022 for violating its content moderation policies and spreading Covid-19 misinformation.