Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk, who famously won a lawsuit defending his right to call people "pedo guys," has now chased Twitter's former head of safety and integrity out of his home by implying he is a fan of pedophilia. Musk relied on a decade-old, out-of-context quote by Yoel Roth to defame him.
Roth, the now-departed head of trust and safety, received increased threats after Musk promoted a baseless accusation that his former employee endorsed children accessing "adult Internet services," CNN first reported Monday afternoon.
"Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis," Musk wrote in a tweet Saturday, with a screenshot to what appears to be a thesis written by Roth about gay hookup apps, specifically Grindr. In it, he argues that services like these, which already are known to have underage users, should "focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases" as a form of harm reduction on social media. Roth is gay.
That Musk tweet came shortly after he replied in support of a message from Eliza Bleu, a podcaster and self-identified anti-human trafficking advocate, seemingly accusing Roth of being "the problem" in regards to child sex abuse material on the platform. Bleu's accusation came with a 12-year-old tweet from Roth with a link to a Salon news article discussing a sexual misconduct case between a teacher and student.
