When Twitter's former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth was given the chance to savage Elon Musk, he took a moderate stance.
"People really want him to be the villain of the story, and they want him to be unequivocally wrong and bad, and everything he says is duplicitous," Roth told tech journalist Kara Swisher earlier this month. "That wasn't my experience... he's not the unequivocal villain of the story, and I think it would be unfair to suggest that he is."
But the sense of charity clearly wasn't mutual. On Saturday, Musk used his giant public megaphone to groundlessly imply that Roth – an openly gay Jewish man who was already the target of an ongoing right-wing hate campaign – was a danger to children or an enabler of child abuse.
The suggestion was based on a highly tendentious reading of Roth's PhD thesis and a decade-old tweet, which offer no evidence of support for the sexualisation of children.
That did not stop Twitter users from targeting Roth with a flood of homophobic abuse, false accusations, and threats of violence, while conservative news outlets and commentators picked up Musk's narrative, calling Roth a "groomer" and "sick".
It was a sharp escalation in Musk's affinity for the far right, which has spent this year stoking violence and discrimination against LGBT+ people by equating support for their rights with child sexual abuse. The Independent has asked Musk and Twitter for comment.
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