Maybe it’s because I’m not a monster, but I have a hard and fast rule in life: Never be on the side of abusive monsters who post child pornography. It’s served me well so far and allows me to look at myself in the mirror occasionally. Elon Musk apparently does not have such code, or any moral code for that matter and as we all know: a man must have a code.
To catch you up, even though you will soon wish I hadn’t, Musk personally made sure a monster’s Twitter account was reinstated to the platform after it was deleted for posting a link to a mind-boggling amount of exploitative images of children, but don’t worry everyone! He made sure the offending images were deleted from the account, first.
The account in question, which was suspended and reinstated a few hours later, is that of all-around garbage person Dom Lucre. A conspiracy theory posting a right-wing stain on humanity, who posted a link to the worst thing you can find on the internet. Per Daily Dot:
The user, a popular conspiracy theorist, was suspended after sharing a post to his more than 580,000 followers that allegedly contained pictures related to a case surrounding an Australian man who was sentenced to life and an additional 129 years in prison in 2018 for sexually abusing children in the Philippines.
F*** no. That sort of thing does not deserve a time-out. That deserves a permanent ban on every social media platform and a knock at the door from the DOJ within the hour. What in the world is going on inside Musk’s head that he wants that kind of person on the platform he bought his way into?! Obviously, it only gets worse from here:
Here’s a link to the CNN article included in Musk’s tweet. It outlines the horrific crimes the sexual abuser committed. He will die in prison. Good.
You know, I’ve never bought my way into a CEO position, so this is all coming from a hypothetical place, but maybe people who link out to exploitative images of children don’t really need an appeal process? Shouldn’t that be a one and you’re done offense, and then maybe they’re loaded into a cannon and shot directly into the sun?! Again, not a CEO but I am a human being, so it just seems logical.
Never one to want to rest on his laurels for simply being terrible, Musk doubled down on awfulness and did a full run at being the literal worst:
Oh, well, OK. If only your employees were subjected to horrific images of child pornography that were bad enough to contribute to sending a man to prison for 255 years… What the actual f***?! Does Musk not realize how soul-destroying seeing those images would be?! Why is he flippantly brushing it off like it’s no big deal? One or more of his employees had to look at that. It’s a big deal.
Look, I like to joke about Musk a lot on this site. It’s fun. He’s an idiot. But this crosses a line into something so dark, disturbing, and disgusting, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around it. There is something fundamentally broken inside of him that he is OK letting someone on the site he owns, who would link out to something as depraved and horrendous as that. Truly.
The only bleak upside to any of this is the inevitable “ripped from the headlines” SVU episode when the writers’ and actors’ strikes are finally over, that maybe something bad will happen to the Musk avatar in the episode, and we’ll get some kind of moral catharsis, here. I want so desperately for this sorry excuse for a human being to feel shame over this, but it’s crystal clear he has no code, no moral compass, and if his stance weren’t so horrifying, I might feel sorry for him. Instead, I’ll save my sympathy for the victims of the horrendous crimes that were once again exploited by a Twitter user Musk thought was appropriate to reinstate. Just shameful.
(Featured image: Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)
