Billionaires Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey publicly disagreed about Twitter’s handling of child exploitation in a series of tweets over the weekend.
Musk, who took over the company in October, took to the social media platform on Friday where he blasted former Twitter executives, stating that it “is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years.”
His post was in response to a tweet from a Twitter user that linked to a New York Post report on a lawsuit that alleges Twitter refused to take down images of a teenager who was tricked into sending explicit photos of themselves to sex traffickers when they were aged between 13 and 14.
The lawsuit, which does not identify the plaintiff, claims that Twitter refused to do so because it did not find the images violated its policies on child exploitation materials. It also accused the company of profiting off the footage.
Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter CEO in November 2021, quickly responded to Musk’s tweet, writing, “This is false,” prompting another response from the Tesla CEO.
“No, it is not. When Ella Irwin, who now runs Trust & Safety, joined Twitter earlier this year, almost no one was working on child safety,” Musk said. “She raised this with Ned & Parag [former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal] but they rejected her staffing request. I made it top priority immediately.”
Musk then accused Agrawal of having “super messed up priorities.”
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“I don’t know what happened in past [sic] year. But to say we didn’t take action for years isn’t true. You can make all my emails public to verify. Company [sic] took away my access to email or I would,” Dorsey fired back.
