Elon Musk escalated his battle of words with previous managers of Twitter into risky new territory over the weekend, allying himself with far-right crusaders against a purported epidemic of child sex abuse and implying that the company’s former head of trust and safety had a permissive view of sexual activity by minors.
Musk told more than 30,000 listeners in a live Twitter Spaces audio session Friday night that he recently discovered that child sex abuse material was a severe problem on Twitter and that fighting it would be his top priority.
In follow-up tweets Saturday, he misrepresented a section of a graduate dissertation from recently departed safety chief Yoel Roth. “Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis,” he wrote.
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The attached snippet instead showed Roth suggesting that since teenagers were accessing apps and websites that they were not supposed to use, as they always have, those services should consider offering toned-down content alongside adult fare.
Musk also commented on an old tweet in which Roth wrote, “Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?” Roth did not answer his own question, merely linking to an article about a Washington Supreme Court ruling that found a teacher in the state could be convicted of a crime for having sex with a student who was over the age of 18. The age of consent in Washington is 16, but a majority of the...
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