Now We Know: While Twitter Was Busy Silencing Conservatives, It Let Child Porn Fester
Since Elon Musk took over, Twitter has been kicking more people off its network. Except this time around it isn’t conservatives getting the boot. It’s those trafficking in child porn.
This is what the left and woke companies are freaking out about?
Cybersecurity firm Ghost Data reported over the weekend that Twitter had nearly doubled the number of accounts it’s suspending each day that were sharing child pornography.
“In the past 24 hours, Twitter started to step up its efforts and took down 44,000 suspicious accounts, including over 1,300 profiles that tried to bypass detection using codewords and text in images to communicate. Zero tolerance,” said Ghost Data founder Andrea Stoppa, who has been monitoring this, in a tweet.
“Twitter is now fighting vigorously against child sexual exploitation content, it’s thanks to one person that set it as the #1 priority: Elon Musk,” she tweeted.
“It is true,” Musk said, “Twitter has done more to stop child exploitation in the last month than probably the last 10 years. That’s insane. It kind of blows my mind, frankly.”
Long before Musk took control, Twitter knew it had a massive child porn problem on its hands but was doing little to stamp it out.
In September, tech news site The Verge got its hands on 58 pages of internal documents about the network’s child porn problem. Among them was a document from February 2021 stating that “While the amount of (child sexual exploitation) online has grown exponentially, Twitter’s investment in technologies to detect and manage the growth has not.”
After talking with former and current staff and executives, The Verge reported that “Twitter still has a problem with content that sexually exploits children. Executives are apparently well-informed about the issue, and the company is doing little to fix it.” (Emphasis added.)
Twitter also faces a lawsuit, filed last year, over how it dealt with graphic sexual videos of two children that went viral on its platform.
As Forbes tells it, “The social media giant took nine days to remove the content, despite the material constituting illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the plaintiffs say in their complaint. It was only after the content had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and a Department of Homeland Security agent had demanded the content be taken down, that Twitter finally took action.”
Yet, as recently as April, the company claimed it could do little to stop child porn. In a memo unearthed by The Verge, one Twitter official said the company “cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale.”
The mainstream press largely ignored this scandal, until Musk bought Twitter. Then suddenly it became something that Musk was going to make “a whole lot worse.” The press was fixated on reports that Musk has been laying off Twitter staff, including those on the team responsible for removing child sexual abuse material.
But if what Ghost Data found is accurate, whatever those laid-off employees were doing about child porn, it wasn’t very effective.
So, the question is, while Twitter was twiddling its thumbs over child porn over the past several years, what was it doing?
Based on the revelations that also came out this weekend about how Twitter went into overdirve to block the Hunter Biden laptop story from spreading, it was busy stamping out “misinformation,” which translates into “anything conservatives are saying on Twitter.”
“Twitter was far more effective at suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story than it has ever been at removing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from the platform,” noted Breitbart.
All of this puts the attacks on Musk in a new light. After he took over the social media platform, the left freaked out that he wouldn’t do enough to censor “misinformation,” and 50 major corporations pulled their ads.
Apparently, silencing conservatives is more important to them than protecting children.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
