There's not much to say about this one, but it also seems wrong to ignore it. Earlier this week, Twitter suspended prominent far-right and QAnon conspiracy crank Dom Lucre without explanation, causing a site uproar among other prominent far-right conspiracy cranks, the sort of cranks site owner Elon Musk has been promoting and sucking up to himself. Musk looked into the suspension, and he says:
1) The account was suspended for, in Musk's words, "posting child exploitation pictures associated with the criminal conviction of an Australian man in the Philippines."
2) So he’s going to override the suspension and reinstate the guy.
You might be thinking "What the actual fuck, Elon." You would not be alone.
As an aside, mark this down as another bit of evidence for my own pet theory, which is that a great many of the people inside QAnon are in QAnon because they like child exploitation, like to comb the web for it, and like to craft elaborate hoax theories about child exploitation that do nothing but foul real-world law enforcement investigations by flooding police phone lines instead with calls about imaginary pizza restaurant basements and how whoever Donald Trump has named as his latest enemy is probably in league with it all. But back to the main point: If there was one online crime you would think Musk would be okay with banning even if the rule made his hoax-promoting Nazi fanclub sad, it would be "posting child exploitation pictures."
But no. No, you'd be wrong. If you're in Musk's special orbit of far-right cool kids, you get to post photos of naked children and he'll insert himself between you and Twitter's entire moderation staff to make sure you get reinstated.
Ick. Ick, ick, ick. There're no jokes to make about this one, and Musk's "X" is going from merely being gross to becoming a billionaire-owned dark-web site. On one hand he's willing to intervene if members of the far-right get themselves banned for posting this stuff, and on the other hand Musk is mounting an all-out effort to turn "X" into an online bank so his allies can ... what? Monetize it?
Sign the petition: Denounce Elon Musk’s tyrannical takeover of Twitter.
