We know from first-hand experience that Elon Musk lied about permitting banned individuals to return to Twitter. So it wouldn’t be too terribly surprising if CDAN is correct and he is also failing to tell the truth about eradicating child porn from the platform.
Shortly after the celebrity CEO took over the bird site, the CEO enlisted many online influencers to boost lies about purported success at removing child porn from the site, most notably top hashtags used to advertise the stuff. I told you the celebrity CEO was lying, and that a major news organization was conducting a significant investigation exposing all of this. It was just recently published, and you should go and read it. Child porn has gotten worse on the bird site, not better, since the celebrity CEO took over.
The story is at NBC News. And while it’s worth noting that NBC doesn’t appear to have had any problem with the market in what it calls “child sexual abuse material” on Twitter until Musk bought it, that doesn’t change the fact that what he says is no longer on the platform is still on the platform.
Twitter accounts that offer to trade or sell child sexual abuse material under thinly veiled terms and hashtags have remained online for months, even after CEO Elon Musk said he would combat child exploitation on the platform.
“Priority #1,” Musk called it in a Nov. 20 tweet. He’s also criticized Twitter’s former leadership, claiming that they did little to address child sexual exploitation, and that he intended to change things.
But since that declaration, at least dozens of accounts have continued to post hundreds of tweets in aggregate using terms, abbreviations and hashtags indicating the sale of what Twitter calls child sexual exploitation material, according to a count of just a single day’s tweets. The signs and signals are well known among experts and law enforcement agencies that work to stop the spread of such material.
The tweets reviewed by NBC News offer to sell or trade content that is commonly known as child pornography or child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The tweets do not show CSAM, and NBC News did not view any CSAM in the course of reporting this article.
Some tweets and accounts have been up for months and predate Musk’s takeover. They remained live on the platform as of Friday morning.
Then again, it’s possible that this is just a whack-a-mole problem that is in the process of being resolved. The question is whether Musk has actually given meaningful orders to his employees to get the job done and they’re dragging their feet or if he’s merely acting as his own PR and marketing departments. But given our success in establishing and implementing SG’s Clean Speech policy, and the ease with which spam bots can be detected and eradicated, there really isn’t any excuse for not eliminating the garbage from the platform.