The man who banned Donald Trump
Twitter employee Yoel Roth deplatformed a president. Now he’s being probed by Elon Musk.
Published in
7 min readDec 11, 2022
On January 8, 2021, Twitter banned Donald Trump’s personal account. It was a historic deplatforming of a head of state—and made a star of Yoel Roth.
As head of ‘Trust & Safety’ at Twitter, he’d overseen the banning. But with Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform, Yoel is getting a digital probing.
Yoel Roth was born in California in 1987.
It’s the year, he’s noted, that the New York Times first used the word ‘gay’.
He grew up in Boca Raton, Florida. In keeping with the area, he is, as he tweeted once: “Extremely Fucking Jewish”—though a longtime atheist.
In 1999, his local newspaper published a poem he wrote with two other students. Is it eerily prophetic? It’s a story of someone who became “famous,” then whose “life is gone,” with “my reputation.”
