Posted on December 5, 2022

Eric Holder’s Partisan Fingerprints Were All Over Apple’s “Trust and Safety” Department During 2020 Election

Revolver, December 1, 2022

Elon Musk’s noble crusade to restore free speech to the global public square has so far been everything patriots dared hope for: a declaration of war against our corrupt regime and the censorship required to sustain it. So far Elon has met and exceeded our expectations, having restored President Trump, announced a  “general amnesty for banned accounts,” and done away with the site’s old Orwellian Covid “misinformation” policy.

We predicted in a now-classic piece (which Elon read) that the Regime would respond ruthlessly to such a provocation. Real free speech is simply too dangerous to be allowed, and any effort to restore it, we said, would be met with an all-out media, bureaucratic, legal, and economic assault.

And now, it looks like the regime is trying to leverage one of its greatest weapons to nip Elon’s Twitter in the bud: the world’s largest company, Apple.

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It is one thing for Apple to curtail advertising with Twitter. Several companies have done that, under the pretext of “brand safety” — a mafia shakedown technique which will be the subject of a future Revolver report. It would be quite another matter for Apple to cripple Twitter’s distribution by banning them from Apple’s App Store.

For all but a tiny minority of tech-savvy consumers, the App Store is the only way to add new software to an iPhone. And iPhones make up more than 50 percent of all smartphone sales in the U.S., meaning that with the push of a button, Apple could block half the country from downloading and using Twitter’s app. Since over 85 percent of all Twitter use is on mobile devices, an app store ban for Twitter would essentially be a killshot for the entire platform — just like it was for Parler, which has never recovered from the merely temporary store ban it received after January 6.

For now, it looks like Apple doesn’t intend to boot out Twitter. But it is clear is that many people badly want them to do it. In an essay for The New York Times, Twitter’s own former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth unsubtly suggested that Google and Apple should bring Musk to heel by weaponizing their app stores. In his capacity as head of Global Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth was central to the decision to suppress coverage Hunter Biden’s laptop in the weeks leading up to the 2020 Presidential election, among many other things. This is quite literally “election meddling.” To his credit, Musk has bravely announced his intention to release Twitter’s internal communications that led up to this history-altering act of political censorship.

If Roth gets his way, and an app store purge eventually happens, it will likely be carried out by the “Trust and Safety” goon squads of other companies. The Orwellian label belies what the “Trust and Safety” role actually entails. The Trust and Safety head at any tech company is essentially that company’s chief censor who decides which statements are acceptable, which get labeled “harassment,” and which ideas get targeted by Artificial Intelligence for automatic deletion.

Roth’s troublesome tenure as head of Twitter raises the obvious question of who his “Trust and Safety” equivalent would be at Apple. Who would play the key role in deciding how and whether to take Twitter off the App Store? {snip}

The current head of Apple Trust and Safety is someone who is clearly aware of the value of having a low profile online. Look for details on Jessica Gimarc-Savini and you’ll find her sparse LinkedIn page, her (lesbian) wedding page, and not much else.

While we know little about Jessica Savini, we can learn much from a profile of her predecessor, former head of Trust and Safety at Apple Margaret Richardson.

Richardson served as Apple’s top trust and safety figure from August 2020 through May 2022.

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While Richardson wisely avoided tweeting during her tenure at Apple, at her previous job, first as “director of global policy” and then “director of trust” as Airbnb, Richardson was entirely unrestrained. Her still-extant tweets from August 2020 and before give a stark demonstration of her thinking, a perpetually-spinning hamster wheel of stock left-wing political tropes. For starters, Richardson’s Twitter banner screams “Black Lives Matter”!

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Richardson isn’t just deeply ideological, pro-BLM, and so forth. She’s also narrowly and almost pettily partisan.

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Five months after Richardson started at Apple, the company made one of the most ideologically aggressive cancellations ever when it banned Parler from its app store. While Apple works hard to obscure its decision-making process, Richardson was without a doubt central to that decision, and with her involved, it wasn’t a surprising one. In April 2022, shortly before she left, the company also committed itself to a ridiculous internal “racial equity audit.”

{snip} She has a noticeable preference for boosting senior figures from the Obama Administration itself — Valerie Jarrett, Arne Duncan, John Kerry, and so forth. Richardson was particularly active when President Trump dismissed acting attorney general Sally Yates for insubordination after she refused to enforce his executive order implementing a travel ban on several nations linked to Islamic terrorism.

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After earning dual degrees in law from UC-Berkeley and in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School, Richardson spent three years working at a free legal clinic in the Bay Area. From there, she went to the Obama campaign, and after his election she joined the Justice Department as a top adviser to Eric Holder, eventually ascending to become his chief of staff.

{snip} Holder wasn’t just an Obama Cabinet member. Holder was one of the most aggressive ideological attack dogs of the whole Obama era.

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Richardson was so close to Holder, in fact, that when Holder left his post in 2015 and went back to Covington and Burling, D.C.’s #1 law firm, Richardson tagged right along, working at the firm for a year. Then, one month after Holder went to Airbnb as an “adviser” to create “anti-discrimination policy” at the company, Richardson lateraled to the company as well to become their “director of global policy.”

For roughly a decade then, this woman was joined at the hip to one of the most unscrupulous ideological hatchetmen of the Obama years. Then, she came into her own at Airbnb, which under her oversight became a corporate leader in the calculated targeting of political enemies. While many companies went on a banning spree after the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Richardson’s Airbnb made its bans before the rally, disabling the accounts of anyone it suspected was planning to attend the (legal and permitted) rally. In 2019, the company banned anybody trying to attend an American Renaissance conference in Tennessee, even if they had otherwise done nothing to violate Airbnb rules:

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