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- Musk called it a “crime” that Twitter prioritized child safety before he took over.
- Musk’s claim was “false”, according to Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter.
- The new trust and safety chief, Ella Erwin, added that it was one of the top priorities for Musk.
The CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk, said it was a crime that the company’s former executives “refused to combat child exploitation.” Musk told Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey that “almost no one was working on child safety” until he took over the company on October 27.
In a series of tweets on Friday, Musk and Dorsey argued over whether Musk’s acquisition of Twitter prioritized child protection.
Increasingly, twitter users are reporting incidents of child exploitation on the platform, including child porn, although this doesn’t violate the platform’s policies. Musk referred to Twitter’s inaction on this as a “crime” since it had been neglecting to address child exploitation on the platform “for years”. The Twitter CEO responded that Musk’s claim was “false.”
“Almost no one was working on child safety when Ella Irwin, who now runs Trust & Safety, joined Twitter earlier this year,” Musk said in response to Dorsey.
It was Irwin’s concern that her staffing request was rejected by former CEO Parag Agrawal and former chief financial officer Ned Segal, Musk said.
Segal had messed up his priorities, according to the billionaire, before he concluded that he had made it his “top priority.”
Wired reported last month that only one Twitter employee remains on a team focused on removing child sexual abuse material across Japan and Asia.
In an unprecedented move, three members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council have resigned. The departing members are Anne Collier, founder, and executive director of The Net Safety Collaborative; Eirliani Abdul Rahman, cofounder of Youth, Adult Survivors & Kin In Need; and Lesley Podesta, advisor at Western Sydney University’s Young and Resilient Research Center.
Experts and advocates believe Musk’s commitment to free speech could make Twitter less capable of combating hate speech, misinformation, and harassment.
Dorsey could not directly be contacted, and Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
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