Links are at the end.
Twitter’s New Head of Trust and Safety Offers to Partner with Controversial Anti-Trafficking Group
Yeah, why not.1
Among the many ongoing dramas involved in Elon Musk reluctantly buying Twitter and taking over as its main character, one is more acrid than most: Musk's accusations that Twitter “refused to take action” on removing child sexual exploitation material, or CSEM, before his tenure.
There’s no reason to think this is true, or that Musk is actually focusing on the issue; in a Twitter exchange with Musk, previous CEO Jack Dorsey called the accusation that the company didn’t take CSEM seriously “false,” and Wired recently reported that Musk’s widespread layoffs gutted the team responsible for ferreting out CSEM in the Asia Pacific region, leaving one person doing this work.
…
Ella Irwin is Twitter’s new head of “Trust and Safety.” She joined the company in June and took over her current role in November. In a December 10 thread, the company account @TwitterSafety said it was “improving our detection and enforcement methods and expanding our partnerships with organizations that help prevent the trafficking of CSE material.” A random Twitter user with 92 followers suggested that the company look into partnering with OUR. Irwin—whose bio on site does not identify her role, and whose identity on the site is verified through a tick indicating she subscribes to the Twitter Blue service—herself immediately jumped in, responding, “@OURrescue please DM me if there is a partnership opportunity here.”
This is just so fucking sordid. Musk, whose attacks on Yoel Roth, the previous trust and safety chief, led to Roth and his family forced from their home by a torrent of death threats, is effectively outsourcing his child endangerment process, via someone with no evident qualifications for her job, herself acting on the recommendation of an anonymous winger, to an organization that itself is accused of endangering children and other trafficking victims.
OUR dramatically overstated its role in the case of a young trafficking survivor, with Ballard implying in Congressional testimony that it had helped to rescue her. In fact, as court records made clear, the survivor bravely escaped on her own, and only met OUR representatives years later, as she was preparing to testify in court against her traffickers. It also claimed to have rescued a group of “sex slaves,” obtained U.S. visas for them, and helped them attend and in some cases graduate university; very little of this turned out to be true. It also engaged in bumbling, amateurish “raids” that experts said could put trafficking victims at risk—and in at least one case did so on the say-so of a psychic medium named Janet—and misrepresented things as minor as whether it had a partnership with American Airlines.
At the same time as this shit is happening, Musk has suspended the accounts of several journalists who were either writing about Musk suspending the account of the youngster tracking the movements of his jet, or were supporting the journalists who got kicked off for writing etc. etc. Musk claims that by writing about this kid who was using publicly available information to track the jet, the reporters were exposing Musk and his family, such as it is, to danger with their bank-shot references to what he now calls “assassination coordinates.”2
On the heels of that, Musk dropped in on a Twitter Spaces forum where journalists were discussing his actions against the kid and the journalists. (“Spaces” are audio chat rooms which can be convened by anyone on the service.) After various journalists — including one who had been suspended but evidently still had access to the Spaces function — challenged him on his rationale for suspending the kid and the journalists, Musk abruptly left the chat and, moments, later, pulled the plug on not just that specific chat, ending it with one of the journalists in mid-sentence, but on the chat function altogether until the the bug allowing access to suspended accounts was fixed.3
Next this motherfucker will be sending people to the cornfield. We should note that he hasn’t suspended the FAA’s account despite their insistence on providing assassination coordinates to his growing list of enemies.
We should also note that our own Twitter account, while never a big draw, experienced about a 90% drop in views after we started billing ourselves as “Elon’s Unemployed Conscience,” and hasn’t recovered since.
We should also note that he just reinstated Mike Lindell, which frankly after he started reinstating neo-Nazis is almost refreshingly unremarkable.
And we should note that it’s his fucking company — his and some small-ish investors, including some prominent members of the bin Bonesaw family, who may be getting a bit antsy — and he can pretty much do whatever he wants so long as it doesn’t break the law or run afoul of the FCC consent degree under which it operates, or the EU’s rather strict hate speech and data privacy guidelines. But goddamn.
It’s obvious that this adolescent sociopath will be generating a continuing stream of grotesqueries both Twitter-related and not, much like Trump has in his White House and subsequent days, so we will be trying really hard to stop getting caught up in his shit.
Attorney disciplinary committee says Giuliani violated ethics rules with 2020 election fraud claims
Finally, some good news!4
2-year-old boy rescued after being swallowed by a hippo in Uganda
More good news!5
"It took the bravery of a one Chrispas Bagonza, who was nearby, to save the victim after he stoned the hippo and scared it, causing it to release the victim from its mouth," a spokesperson for Uganda Police Force said in the statement.
That story also includes an unrelated video of a large and grimly deceased python with its pre-execution meal exposed.
Ten people who helped shape science in 2022
And finally finally, the journal Nature has a list of people with influential roles in diverse areas of science, including one dear to our own interests: Lisa McCorkell.6
As a graduate student, Lisa McCorkell studied how to take on some of the biggest challenges in social policy, including food poverty and social safety nets. But there was one subject she steered clear of: health care. “I felt like it was too complicated,” she says. “I was trying to stay away from that.”
These days, she spends much of her time enmeshed in health-care policy. After a mild bout of COVID-19 in 2020, she contracted a debilitating case of long COVID, which continues to affect her daily life. Later that year, she and four other women with the condition founded the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, a group of researchers who conduct and inform studies into the condition.
. . .
The collaborative’s approach feels particularly fitting for long COVID: from the start, patients have often had to advocate for their own medical care and design their own treatment regimens. The confusion and fear was tremendously isolating, says Letícia Soares, who works for the collaborative from Salvador in Brazil. “Connecting to others who were doing the same was really the only way through it both emotionally just to survive and to see a path forward,” she says.
The list also includes Jane Rigby, who runs the Webb Space Telescope operations crew, and is thereby more than a little responsible for the fabulous images and endless streams of data the new telescope provides.
Good Stuff! Good news! Good science journalism! Goddamn!
Busman’s Holiday, “Good Songs;” we really enjoyed this, from a couple of Indiana busking brothers and some of their friends. We picked Mike Clark & The Sugar Sounds for the name, and their “Moon Rock” album is okay but not destined for heavy rotation.
That, comrades, is all we got, and we’re happy to have got it, and we hope you are too. Take care, be well.
The constant back and forth about Twitter makes ordinary non users, like me, almost as familiar with its continuing soap opera as users. The more I read about it, the more satisfied I am with my non participation. The fact that it was a principal tool of Trump's malignancy made me pleased with its diminution and, perhaps, ultimate demise.