The fifth edition of the Twitter Files dropped yesterday, renewing the ongoing scrutiny of the company’s hidden censorship agenda and Twitter’s efforts to influence the outcome of the 2020 election. One person who has been made unexpectedly famous as a result of these document dumps is the company’s former chief of “trust and safety,” Yoel Roth. He obviously played a key role in setting the policies that silenced conservative opinions and he was regularly meeting with people from the FBI and other federal government agencies, presumably to coordinate the censorship efforts. (Something he mockingly joked about during internal company discussions.) Roth definitely doesn’t seem to be enjoying all of the newfound attention he’s been receiving. In fact, CNN is reporting that he and his boyfriend wound up fleeing their home this weekend after allegedly receiving threats and verbal attacks over his role in the company’s censorship policies.

Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.

Yoel Roth, who resigned from the social media company in November, has in recent weeks faced a storm of attacks and threats of violence following the release of the so-called “Twitter Files” — internal Twitter communications that new owner Musk has released through journalists including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.

Roth’s position involved him working on sensitive issues including the suspension of then-President Donald Trump’s account in 2021.

I haven’t been able to find any examples of evidence of direct communications with Roth that included threats, but such messages are never appropriate. Plenty of people have been complaining about Roth online (ironically on Twitter), but that’s hardly the same thing as death threats or bomb threats.

CNN goes on to claim that the “attacks” on Yoel Roth escalated after Elon Musk “appeared to endorse a tweet that baselessly accused Roth of being sympathetic to pedophilia — a common trope used by conspiracy theorists to attack people online.”

I saw those tweets and looked into the background a bit, leading me to pose one question to CNN. Did you really just say “baselessly?” While it’s rather dated (from back in 2010), Roth absolutely did ask if high school students can ever “meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers.”

Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers? http://bit.ly/bbpH68

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 20, 2010

On top of that, it is also not disputed that Roth suggested in his Ph.D. thesis that minors should be able to access the gay “hook-up” app Grindr. I don’t know about you, but that certainly sounds like a fairly solid history of “being sympathetic to pedophilia” to me. That’s not to say that Roth is guilty of having committed the crime himself. I’ve seen nothing to even suggest that possibility. But if you’re going to go around advocating for the “right” of adults to rape minors (who are unable to give informed consent, answering the question in Roth’s 2010 tweet), you should expect some public blowback.

None of this is meant to imply that Yoel Roth should be subjected to any form of violence or even threats of violence. Anyone engaging in that sort of activity should be condemned. But whether he likes it or not, Roth is now a public figure thanks to his position at one of the largest social media platforms on the web. And his history in that position, specifically his potentially illegal collaboration with the federal government to censor the free speech of citizens, has made him a subject of public scrutiny for good reason.