Forbes Exploits the Child Porn Issue on Twitter to Attack Elon Musk

AP Photo/Matt Rourke

The war against Twitter CEO Elon Musk continues. The activist media still cannot accept the fact that the left is losing its grip on the social media company and have been attacking Musk on an almost daily basis. Forbes is no different.

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In fact, the outlet published a report on Wednesday criticizing the company’s new chief executive for supposedly not cleaning up Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) on the platform. The article comes about a week after Musk, who has said he is addressing child porn on the site, took action towards removing CSAM from Twitter.

The authors noted comments made by conservative podcaster Liz Wheeler in which she praised Musk for his efforts to protect children. But right after they begin their attack:

Yet such illegal material remains alarmingly easy to find on Twitter—in multiple languages. Hashtags and search terms long related to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) still return lots of associated content. And recently departed Twitter employees, from the rank-and-file to the executive level, told Forbes the issue will be far more difficult to combat now that Musk has obliterated the teams charged with policing it, as well as their institutional knowledge.

As one such team member explained: “No one is left who is an expert on these issues and can do the work. . . . It’s a ghost town.”

The authors also noted that while the company has dealt with hashtags commonly used to share child porn, “plenty” of other hashtags have yet to be removed. The activist media outlet explained that after “under an hour” of searching the platform, Forbes “found dozens of users offering to buy and sell child sexual abuse images and videos.”

“One offered footage of nude children ages 5 to 17,” the article continued.

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The authors added:

Another mentioned an exchange of images of children being abused on Telegram. Both these tweets, as well as nearly 30 others either promoting or seeking CSAM, were posted in the last week.

The article reported that searches of banned hashtags still displayed advertisements for problematic material. “One Twitter search for links to a well-known online storage platform returned a number of tweets offering videos of young boys and girls having sex with fathers and ‘with adult,’ as well as images of ‘forced sex.’”

It is difficult to see this as anything other than an attempt to counter Musk’s announcement that he is working to tamp down on CSAM. Apparently, these people expected that he would completely wipe out child porn on Twitter in one month when the company’s prior leadership did very little to address the problem.

Speaking of the past, I did a search on Forbes’ website and found that they published only one article regarding child abuse on Twitter before Musk took over. It was an opinion piece published in 2013 that reported on Vine, the platform’s now-defunct video-sharing service.

But after Musk took over, the outlet has already put out two pieces specifically targeting Musk’s handling of the matter. Eliza Bleu, an anti-human trafficking advocate who worked with the CEO on this issue, perfectly summed up the story:

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 sh*ts before he purchased @Forbes

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This is how low these people are willing to go, folks. Articles like this show that Musk’s critics are willing to exploit the issue of child abuse just to attack him. But we know what this is really about, don’t we?

Mainstream activist media outlets are upset about the fact that Musk is intent on creating a level playing field for political views on the platform. He is an outspoken proponent of citizen journalism. Moreover, under his leadership, it is not likely that Twitter will try to influence elections in the Democrats’ favor as it did when it suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 election. In essence, they are looking for any possible weapon to use against him to hinder his progress. To them, the child porn issue offers yet another cudgel they can use against the big bad Musk.

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