Twitter: Billionaires Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey Clash Over Child Porn

The two billionaires are friends but they have just aired their differences publicly, after accusations from Musk against the former teams of Twitter.

They are friends.

They both care about Twitter, the town square of our times. 

One co-founded the platform and ran it, before leaving in November 2020. The other is one of its most influential personalities and acquired the social network last October for $44 billion. The former unsurprisingly rolled his stake into his friend's new Twitter, or Twitter 2.0.

The first is Jack Dorsey, who also co-founded the payments company Block  (SQ) - Get Free Report, formerly known as Square. He has certainly moved away from Twitter, but he is still closely following the transformation of the company he co-founded, by the second, who is Elon Musk.

The two men admire and respect each other. Dorsey has never hidden that, for him, Musk was the most influential personality on the social network long before the he became its owner. He wanted Musk as a Twitter board member but the board denied his request.

Mutual Respect

While many critics of Tesla's  (TSLA) - Get Free Report CEO predict the death of Twitter under his command, Dorsey defends Musk and wants to be clear: Twitter will not die.

"It won't die," Dorsey responded to a Twitter user on Dec. 4, after the user suggested that the platform was about to go under. "Not being public right now is great cover to reset and thrive," he added the following day.

Musk also shows a lot of respect for Dorsey. He recently defended him when, following the publication of the famous Twitter Files which he orchestrated himself, many Twitter users felt that Dorsey had shown bias against conservatives by banning a large number of them from the platform. For Musk, Dorsey didn't know. He was often not aware of certain decisions.

"Controversial decisions were often made without getting Jack’s approval and he was unaware of systemic bias," the billionaire defended his friend on Dec. 8. "The inmates were running the asylum. Jack has a pure heart imo."

But despite these displays of mutual respect, the two billionaires, who are also serial entrepreneurs, have just revealed a major divergence on a very sensitive subject: child pornography. 

Musk, who maintains that he inherited a company in a very poor state, has just accused the former Twitter teams of not caring about the safety of children on the platform.

It all started with a thread from a member of Twitter's Trust & Safety Council, announcing that she and two other members had decided to leave the council.

"Three of us resigned from Twitter’s Trust & Safety Council today: @eirliani @podesta_lesley and me," Anne Collier wrote on Dec. 8.

'It's a Crime'

Alt-right social media personality Mike Cernovich then commented, telling Collier that she and the other two members should be in jail for allegedly refusing to remove child pornography content from the platform.

"You all belong in jail," Cernovich posted, with a link to a New York Post article on the matter.

"It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!" Musk chimed in on Dec. 9.

It seems that Dorsey does not accept this accusation, which includes the years when he was running Twitter.

"This is false," Dorsey immediately pushed back.

Seeming surprised, Musk stood by his comment, adding that he had broken with the past by making the non-exploitation of children a priority.

"No, it is not," Musk replied. "When Ella Irwin, who now runs Trust & Safety, joined Twitter earlier this year, almost no one was working on child safety. She raised this with Ned & Parag, but they rejected her staffing request. I made it top priority immediately."

Musk is referring to former CEO Parag Agrawal and former CFO Ned Segal. He fired both executives a few minutes after he finalized the Twitter deal.

"At the same time, Ned was spending millions of dollars on Warriors seats. Super messed up priorities," Musk continued.

Dorsey was unimpressed. He repeated that Twitter had been proactive against child pornography in the past. He asked Musk to release all his emails when he was CEO, to prove he was right. Dorsey went so far as to say he would have done it himself, if he still had access.

"I don’t know what happened in past year," Dorsey said. "But to say we didn’t take action for years isn’t true. You can make all my emails public to verify. Company took away my access to email or I would."

Musk has yet to respond to Dorsey's request.

Twitter placed marketing campaigns from vehicle manufacturer Mazda, Dyson and chemicals company Ecolab  (ECL) - Get Free Report alongside tweets soliciting child pornography, a study on online child sex abuse by cybersecurity firm Ghost Data found last September.

More than 30 brands, ranging from Walt Disney (DIS) - Get Free Report to Coca-Cola  (KO) - Get Free Report and NBCUniversal  (CMCSA) - Get Free Report had ads that appeared on Twitter account pages next to content promoting child pornography.

"We are working closely with our clients and partners to investigate the situation and take the appropriate steps to prevent this from happening in the future," a Twitter spokesperson told TheStreet at the time. "In addition to the ongoing work being done to better detect and suspend accounts posting CSE [child sexual exploitation] material, we are working with our product teams to ensure we have the right models, processes and products in place to help keep everyone who uses Twitter safe - people and brands alike."

The company said in its Transparency Reports, published last July, that it "suspended 596,997 unique accounts during this reporting period – a 32% increase since the previous report."

The reports covers July-December 2021.