The battle against Twitter CEO Elon Musk goes on. The left continues to lose control of the social media company, and activist media continue to attack Musk almost daily. Forbes is no exception.
The outlet published a Wednesday report criticizing Musk’s new chief executive for allegedly failing to clean up Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). This article is published a week after Musk claimed he was addressing child porn on Twitter and took steps to remove CSAM.
They also referred to comments made by Liz Wheeler, a conservative podcaster, in which she praised Musk’s efforts to protect children. They then begin their attack.
It is still easy to find illegal material on Twitter in multiple languages, however. Much associated content is still returned by search terms and hashtags that are long connected to child sexual abuse material. Forbes was told by a number of former Twitter employees who left the company, from the rank-and-file to the top, that the issue would be much more difficult to solve now that Musk has eliminated the institutions and teams responsible for policing it.
One member of the team explained that “no one is left who can solve these problems and is an expert in them.” . . . “It’s a ghost city.”
They also pointed out that, while the company had dealt with many of the hashtags used to share child pornography, “plenty” of other hashtags remain unremoved. Forbes explained that it took only “under an hour” to search the platform and found dozens of people offering to sell images and videos of child sexual abuse.
The article said that one offered footage of nude children aged 5-17 years old.
The authors also added:
Another mentions an exchange of Telegram images showing children being abused. These tweets and nearly 30 others promoting or seeking CSAM were posted within the last week.
According to the article, searches for banned hashtags returned advertisements for inappropriate material. One Twitter search for links from a well-known online storage site returned many tweets containing videos of young girls and boys having sex with their fathers.
This is hard to understand as anything but an attempt to counter Musk’s recent announcement that he is working on CSAM. These people assumed that Musk would wipe out all child porn on Twitter within a month, despite the fact that the previous leadership had done very little to address this problem.
A search on Forbes’ website revealed that there was only one article about child abuse on Twitter prior to Musk taking over. This was an opinion piece that was published in 2013 and focused on Vine, the platform’s now-defunct video-sharing site.
The outlet already published two pieces specifically targeting Musk’s handling of the matter after Musk assumed control. Eliza Bleu (an anti-human trafficking activist who worked alongside the CEO on this matter) perfectly summarized the story.
This platform has been plagued by a problem for more than a decade. It will take over a month to fix this issue on a large scale.
You never gave two sh*ts to him before he bought @Forbes
The platform has had a well documented problem for over a decade it’s going to take more than a month to solve this issue at scale.
And you never gave two shits before he purchased @Forbes https://t.co/pnXUZxqYy9
— Eliza (@elizableu) December 1, 2022
This is the level of depravity these people will go to. These articles show that Musk’s critics will exploit the child abuse issue to attack him. We know the truth, don’t you?
Musk’s determination to create a level playing ground for political views on the platform has upset mainstream activist media outlets. Musk is a vocal advocate for citizen journalism. Under his leadership, Twitter is unlikely to try to influence elections in Democrats’ favor, as it did with the Hunter Biden laptop story, just before the 2020 election. They are searching for any weapon they can use against him to impede his progress. They see child porn as a weapon against Musk.
