Twitter’s New Head of Trust and Safety Offers to Partner with Controversial Anti-Trafficking Group

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. The main significance of the claim seems to be signaling to the conspiracy theorists and anti-LGBTQ+ activists whom he’s been courting by, among other things, attacking his own one-time employees. (Twitter’s former head of “Trust and Safety,” Yoel Roth, was forced into hiding after Musk baselessly smeared him as being in favor of the sexualization of children.)

All of this being so, Musk has claimed that he’s making removing CSEM a top priority. And one of his top lieutenants has eagerly followed along, reaching out for help from Operation Underground Railroad, or OUR, a deeply controversial anti-trafficking organization with a long track record of exaggeration and misrepresentation. OUR, to all appearances, stands ready to help.

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.” 

Cheryl Snapp Conner, an OUR spokesperson, said, “You can see through Irwin’s public Tweet that Twitter is inviting OUR to initiate a meeting to discuss collaboration and you can see my public response that we’re delighted to do that.”

OUR, which is based in Utah, has presented itself as a crusading anti-sex trafficking organization that engages in daring stings overseas and equips law enforcement with high-tech tools at home. But a series of Motherboard investigations has found that OUR and its head, Tim Ballard, have serially exaggerated their capabilities and effectiveness while fending off prosecutorial inquiries into whether OUR has misused donor funds and itself participated in human trafficking.

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. 

Ballard, for his part, was ousted as CEO of the Nazarene Fund, an allied anti-trafficking group backed by right-wing media personality Glenn Beck, last year. (He has since reclaimed his position as CEO.) Beck publicized its efforts with a variety of bold claims about the centrality of its role in a scheme to exfiltrate vulnerable refugees from Afghanistan that, as Motherboard reported, weren’t, according to people involved, exactly true.

As Motherboard has reported, OUR and related entities have been under investigation since 2020 by the County Attorney of Davis County, Utah and a constellation of federal agencies. (Two years later, there’s been little outward progress, and it’s unclear what the status of that investigation is. In the past, OUR has told Motherboard that it "has complied with all laws that regulate nonprofits and intends to cooperate fully with any official inquiry, if asked.") 

There’s also the matter of QAnon. In 2020, Ballard appeared to give credence to a QAnon-backed conspiracy theory that children were being trafficked through the furniture company Wayfair. OUR states on its website that the organization “does not condone conspiracy theories and is not affiliated with any conspiracy theory group in any way, shape, or form,” but Ballard chose to appear virtually at a fringe conspiracy conference where pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood, an enthusiastic promoter of QAnon-inflected conspiracy theories, enthusiastically promoted QAnon-inflected conspiracy theories. Jim Caviezel, an actor who played Ballard in a biopic that has been in development since 2018, also spoke at length onstage about “the adrenochroming of children,” another QAnon staple. (A formal premiere for the film, titled Sound of Freedom, has been announced several times but has seemingly never occurred; most recently, it was reportedly set to screen at a film festival in the small community of Coronado Island, California. In February 2022, Tim Ballard said on Instagram that the film is “done,” adding that OUR is “not a stakeholder in this film” and was itself waiting to see when it would come out. “I believe it’s this year, but, you know, the timing has to be right,” he said.) 

All of this, as well as OUR’s distance from the established anti-trafficking community—as Motherboard has reported, it is infamous in NGO circles, and many reputable groups both domestically and abroad refuse to work with it—would seemingly make it an ally of questionable value. It had, though, expressed eagerness to align itself with Musk’s Twitter even before Irwin’s invitation to partner, tweeting at Musk on December 9, “We couldn’t agree more about protecting children, and are ready to help Twitter in any way we can,” and tagging him in a similar tweet a few days later. If Irwin does indeed move forward with a partnership, it would offer OUR legitimation from a major company, and a continued way to burnish the image it’s worked hard to impress upon the public. 

Twitter no longer has a functional communications team; Irwin did not respond to a request for comment tweeted at her by Motherboard. Davis County, Utah Attorney Troy Rawlings, who initiated the investigation into OUR, did not immediately have a statement about whether the investigation is still active; Cheryl Snapp Conner, the OUR spokesperson, did not respond to a question asking if the group has comment on that investigation.