Elon Musk vs Yoel Roth

Forget Sam Brinton, the big news Saturday night was Yoel Roth, Twitter's former Trust & Safety head, who is shown at left above with his husband after their San Francisco wedding in August 2019. Roth was initially kept on at Twitter by its new owner Elon Musk despite presenting himself as the public face of its controversial censorship and banning policies, but as of November 10, he had resigned.

I have yet to endorse Musk as some sort of cultural caudillo, but I can grant that as of late Saturday, he'd at least done homework he should have been doing over a month ago:

Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis: pic.twitter.com/1NiBohjhMQ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2022

A Bloomberg story that covered this tweet commented with the standard line:

Far-right and extremist voices have long pushed a false claim that LGBTQ+ people are sexual predators who are “grooming” children to abuse them. In September, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Extremism said that “the result of this widespread hateful rhetoric has been a spike in harassment, threats and violence targeting the LGBTQ+ community.”

But the problem isn't that people on the far right falsely claim that LGBTQ+ people are all groomers, the problem is that Roth as Twitter's Trust & Safety head himself had a creepy fascination with porn that's reflected, of all things, in his own tweets:

I enjoy having the kinds of meetings where googling “gay bareback porn” is considered academic work.

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) September 25, 2012

or

I'm persistently freaked out by the youth-centric direction my research interests are headed in, given I, you know, hate children.

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) August 24, 2011

or indeed, a secret dirty Twitter account of his own:

Apparently former head of Trust & Safety at Twitter had a “secret dirty twitter account” which has since been scrubbed.

Read this tweet that was tweeted from @yoyoel’s secret dirty account:

Everything is starting to make sense. pic.twitter.com/YpJiX8ckIW

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 12, 2022

One problem with social media is indeed that there's porn all over. I'm not on Twitter at all, but I'm on Facebook primarily for railroad hobby interests that ought to be entirely G-rated. But even there, you can't avoid clickbait porn, including gay images. OK, if you're someone who likes to join railfan groups on Facebook and download incidental porn off them, well, OK, but how is it that the guy on Twitter who was supposed to be controlling this is into gay porn himself and thinks this is all copacetic?

Isn't there a basic problem with public discourse here? Remember that the intent of the 1960s MPAA movie ratings was to replace overall censorship with the idea that people could choose the sexuality of their environment. G was family entertainment, X was under 16 not allowed, and so forth. It's increasingly plain that on social media, this has been replaced, and there's effectively no censorship on highly controversial sexual matters, but there's up to now been heavy-handed censorship of fairly uncontroversial political views.

I'm skeptical that Musk is the guy to fix this -- I'm not sure if even a month ago he had an inkling that it needed fixing. And indeed, maybe all that needed to be done was to fire Roth and hire the right guy to replace him. (How, by the way, did Roth rise to that position in the first place? Should we be asking Mr Dorsey, who is sometimes thought to be gay but claims he isn't?)

But at least, if inadvertently, Musk is raising important questions.