Elon’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ Policy On CSAM Apparently Does Not Apply To Conspiracy Theorist Accounts He Likes

Failures

from the not-how-it-works dept

You may recall that early on in Elon’s ownership of Twitter, he insisted that “removing child exploitation is priority #1” while exhorting his supporters to “reply in the comments” if they saw any.

Leaving aside that this is a ridiculously terrible process for having people report potential CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) or, as some people prefer, CSEM (with the E standing for “exploitation”), there was little to no evidence of this actually being put into practice. Most of the people (one person told me everyone) who worked on the CSAM team was let go or left. Ella Irwin, who headed up trust & safety until she resigned two months ago (as far as I can tell no replacement has been named) made a bunch of statements about how the company was treating CSAM, but there was almost no evidence backing that up.

There were multiple reports of the CSAM mitigation process falling apart. There were reports of CSAM on the platform remaining up for months. Perhaps even worse (and risking serious legal consequences), the company claimed it had suspended 400k accounts, but only reported 8k to law enforcement which is required by law. Oh, and apparently Twitter’s implementation of PhotoDNA broke at some point, which is again incredibly serious as, PhotoDNA (for all its problems) remains a key tool for large sites in fighting known CSAM.

And yet the company still claims (on a Twitter-branded page, because apparently no one actually planned for the “X” transition) that it has a “zero tolerance” policy for CSAM.

The key parts of that page say both “We have a zero-tolerance child sexual exploitation policy on Twitter” and “Regardless of the intent, viewing, sharing, or linking to child sexual exploitation material contributes to the re-victimization of the depicted children.”

Anyway, that all leads up to the following. One of the small group of vocal and popular utter nonsense peddlers on the site, dom_lucre, had his account suspended. A bunch of other nonsense peddlers started wringing their hands about this and fearing that Musk was going soft and was now going to start banning “conservative” accounts. In responses, Elon just came out and said that the account had posted CSAM, that only Twitter “CSE” staff had seen it, and that after removing the tweets in question, it had reinstated that guy’s account.

It’s worth noting that this person was among the hand-picked accounts who received money during Elon’s recent pay-for-stanning rollout.

Almost everything about this statement is problematic, and one that any lawyer would have a heart attack over if Elon were their client. First off, blaming Twitter’s legacy code is getting old and less and less believable each time he does it. He could just say “we fired everyone who understood how stuff worked,” but he can’t quite get there.

Second, posting “the reason” for a suspension is, like in so many cases having to do with trust & safety, trickier and involves more nuances than Elon would ever think through. Just to scratch the surface, sometimes telling users why they were suspended can create more problems, as users try to “litigate” their suspension. It can also alert abusive users to who may have reported them, leading to further abuse. Posting the reason publicly can lead to even more issues, including the potential risk of defamation claims.

But, even more importantly, it’s not a zero tolerance policy if you reinstate the account. It really seems like an “Elon’s inner circle tolerance policy.”

The claim that the only people who saw the images were the CSE team seems… unlikely. Internet sleuths have sniffed out a bunch of replies to his now deleted post (which was up for four days on an account with hundreds of thousands of followers), suggesting that the content was very much seen.

Also, there are big questions about what process Twitter followed here, since deleting the content, telling the world about who was suspended for what, and then reinstating the account are not what one would consider normal. Did Twitter send the content to NCMEC? Did it report it to any other law enforcement? These seem like pretty big questions.

On top of that, viewing that content on Twitter itself could potentially expose users to criminal liability. This whole thing is a huge mess, with a guy in charge who seems to understand literally none of this.

He’s now making Twitter a massive risk to use. At a time when the company is begging advertisers to put their ads on the site, I can’t see how Elon choosing to reinstate someone who posted CSAM, which was left on the site for days, is going to win them back.

Filed Under: content moderation, csam, dom lucre, elon musk, zero tolerance
Companies: ncmec, twitter, x