What should Elon Musk’s top priority at Twitter be now that he owns the company?
Restoring the accounts of well-known Twitter users — like former President Donald Trump — who were suspended from the platform for violations of its terms of service? Publicizing the algorithms responsible for promoting or de-promoting any given tweet or account? Ensuring that users can post unpopular opinions to their threads without fear that they’ll be banned simply because they’re unpopular?
How does thwarting the sexual exploitation of children sound?
According to a tweet from Musk himself, that’s “Priority #1” for the site.
Priority #1
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 21, 2022
Musk was replying to a tweet from Eva Fox, who wrote a piece about Twitter’s efforts to police itself under Musk’s leadership for Tesmanian, an online publication covering news about the various companies Musk owns.
Fox interviewed Eliza Bleu, a human trafficking survivor who now advocates for other victims. Bleu told Fox that Twitter “has not actually done anything meaningful to combat” child sexual exploitation on the platform despite a decade of pleas from advocates — until now.
Bleu wrote in a May Op-Ed that out of over 29 million reports from “electronic service providers” to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children CyberTipline in 2021, fewer than 90,000 had come from Twitter: “I believe that number could, and should, be higher.”
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