CEO Elon Musk and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey clashed on the social media site Friday over Twitter’s track record on dealing with child pornography.
“It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!” Musk responded after conservative commentator Mike Cernovich tweeted at one of three people who resigned from Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council. Cernovich’s post linked to a Jan. 2021 New York Post report on a lawsuit over Twitter’s alleged failure to remove a pornographic video featuring a child. (RELATED: ‘Secret’ Twitter Committee ‘Acknowledged’ Libs Of TikTok Didn’t Violate ‘Hateful Conduct Policy’ After Multiple Suspensions, Memo Shows)
Ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey responded to Musk, saying that the claim was, “false.”
“No, it is not,” Musk responded in another tweet. Musk added that Ella Irwin, the new head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, raised the issue with former CEO Parag Agrawal and former CEO Ned Segal, but they denied her request for more staffing to address child porn.
Musk has previously said that dealing with child sexual exploitation on the social media site would be the top priority.
No, it is not.
When Ella Irwin, who now runs Trust & Safety, joined Twitter earlier this year, almost no one was working on child safety.
She raised this with Ned & Parag, but they rejected her staffing request.
I made it top priority immediately.@ellagirwin
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2022
“At the same time, Ned was spending millions of dollars on Warriors seats,” Musk added in a follow-up tweet. “Super messed up priorities.”
Irwin backed up Musk with a post of her own in response to Dorsey’s denial.
“I wish this was false but my experience this year supports this,” Irwin posted. “I fought hard to get funding to replace the people working on this who left in early 2022 and was told no. At one point there were 0 engineers and very few employees working on CSE and still no funding.”
Musk described Irwin’s comment as “correct” and gave a similar response to a tweet from a “human trafficking survivor advocate” who went by Eliza.
The dispute came on the heels of Thursday’s second release of documents involving Twitter’s censorship of conservatives, focusing on what some call “shadow banning.” Twitter executives, including former CEO Jack Dorsey, denied the practice took place, and also denied that it was done on the basis of political views.
Journalist Matt Taibbi published documents Dec. 2 about Twitter’s actions with regards to an October 2020 report by the New York Post about the contents of a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden. Twitter censored the story, blocking the New York Post from accessing its account.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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