If you were to run a social media company, what would take priority — silencing your political opponents or ridding it of child porn?
If you’re the new owner of Twitter Elon Musk, it’s addressing truly evil things that exploit minors. If you’re a leftist, it appears that it’s making sure conservatives don’t have a voice.
Roughly two-thirds of Twitter’s former 7,500-person workforce have either been fired or have voluntarily departed since Musk took over the company. With the exodus has come a bevy of leftist complaints that the world’s richest man is going to turn the site into the wild west, a bastion of hate, or that the whole thing might fall down altogether.
What those individuals haven’t explained is why it took new ownership to make sure that one of the company’s top focuses is ending the abuse of children on the site.
On Monday, The Daily Wire reported that Musk, who has made sweeping changes within his newly purchased $44 billion company, responded to a report shared by Twitter user EvaFoxU, which features a human trafficking survivor talking about how the company “has begun addressing the issue of posting child sexual exploitation content on Twitter after years of the platform’s inactivity on the subject under past management.”
The tech guru responded that ending the filth on the site is “Priority #1.”
In reaction to Musk’s claims, anti-human trafficking advocate Eliza Bleu said, “After years of advocating for the minor survivors of Twitter, I’ve never been as hopeful as I am right now.”
Bleu, who has oft shared her frustration with social media in general on the matter, added that the swiftness of Musk’s deliberations was welcome news.
“I don’t expect perfection from a platform,” she explained in an interview with Teslarati, a news outlet that reports on all things Musk. “All I’ve ever wanted was to see a sense of urgency around such a serious matter. In many of these cases, this is a matter of life or death for each victim, so every second matters.”
Bleu also directly hit back against former Twitter employees for letting the problem rage.
“The fact of the matter is that Twitter knew about the child sexual abuse material problem for 10+ yrs,” she alleged. “Sued by two minor survivors. Ignored countless victims globally. You failed children. Not me. You.”
She also pointed out that the obscenity was so ubiquitous, dozens of big-name brands left the site.
“You worked at Twitter in September when 30+ brands left advertising on Twitter because of child sexual abuse material,” she tweeted. “Not me. You. You folks reviewed child sexual exploitation material and refused to remove it. The minor survivor begged on the brink of suicide. Over 167,000 views and 2,223 retweets. You did that. Not me. You.”
Yet if you were to ask other Twitter employees, they might say that the site is now more dangerous because Musk believes in free speech.
For example, NPR reported that amongst the staffers who left were ones “who develop automated systems to analyze the 37.5 million tweets posted every hour, and most crucially, a large group of content moderators who constantly review posts.”
For example, one former senior data scientist who worked as a contractor for Twitter told Fortune, “Elon Musk’s decision to let Trump back on the platform is incredibly upsetting. We all worked very hard to keep the platform safe for people to use.”
This isn’t to say that this individual is responsible for the child porn problem. Yet it does raise questions as to who was paying attention to it with the gravitas it needed.
Based on media reports, the company was slow to respond when faced with complaints.
“A minor sued Twitter saying that the company refused to remove a sexually explicit video of him at age 13, originally posted in 2019,” Insider reported. “The minor reported the video but it took nine days for the company to remove it from its platform, and this was only after an agent from the US Department of Homeland Security intervened.”
So to recap, when Twitter was bloated with thousands of employees doing things such as attending yoga sessions during the work day, the company had to be pressured to remove mortifying content that harmed children.
Under Musk and his alleged skeleton crew, not only does it appear the site is working perfectly fine and free speech is better than ever on the platform, but the benevolent Chief Twit has made it his number one goal to rid the site of child porn.
Can any critic explain convincingly why exactly that is a bad thing?
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