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.