Elon Musk reinstated a QAnon-promoting far-right Twitter account that posted child abuse imagery, even though his company’s policy explicitly says that’s not allowed.
On Wednesday, Musk tweeted that the company would reinstate the account of the notorious far-right troll known as “Dom Lucre.” Lucre’s account was banned on Wednesday after he had posted child exploitation images four days previously.
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“For now, we will delete those posts and reinstate the account,” Musk tweeted in response to another account questioning why Twitter had deleted the account.
“I’m told that this account was suspended for posting child exploitation pictures associated with the criminal conviction of an Australian man in the Philippines,” Musk tweeted.
The offending post referenced an assistant to Peter Scully, the Australian man who was sentenced last year to 129 years in prison for sexually abusing children as young as 18 months.
Along with the link to an article about the assistant, the account posted two screenshots from a video Scully created on the dark web, which Lucre said showed a “one-year-old named Daisy.”
On Wednesday, four days after the images were posted, Musk claimed that “only people on our [child sexual exploitation] team have seen those pictures.”
However researchers on Twitter quickly debunked Musk’s claims: Given how long the photos remained on the site, and given how many people reported them, it seems Twitter’s CSE team are not the only people who have seen them. Several screenshots of responses to the post also show that many of the account’s followers did in fact see the images in question.
One researcher posted a screenshot of the tweet’s statistics on July 25, three days after it had been shared. The tweet had racked up over 3.1 million views, almost 17,000 likes and over 8,000 retweets.
Lucre is the online personality of Dominick McGee, who claims to be a musician, veteran, philanthropist, and political commentator. However, just like the conspiracy theories he shares on his Twitter account, most of McGee’s claims about himself have been shown to be false.
Over the last 12 months McGee’s social media accounts have shared a torrent of conspiracy theories on topics as diverse as COVID-19, Jeffrey Epstein, and Ukraine.
Such activity has seen McGee’s account thrive on Musk’s Twitter. He currently has over 580,000 followers and is subscribed to Twitter Blue, meaning his posts are further promoted in other people’s feeds.
Additionally, McGee’s account is part of Twitter’s ad share revenue scheme, meaning he receives a cut of the ads shown next to his tweets.
Twitter did not respond to VICE News’ request for comment but the company’s policy on posting child sexual abuse material is pretty straightforward. “We have a zero-tolerance child sexual exploitation policy on Twitter,” the company states on its website.
Since taking over the site, Musk has said repeatedly that taking CSAM content off the platform was among his top priorities. In recent months, however, multiple reports have shown that under Musk’s leadership, the problem has gotten worse.
“The investigation discovered problems with Twitter’s CSAM detection mechanisms and we reported this issue to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in April, but the problem continued,” researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory said in a report last month. “Having no remaining Trust and Safety contacts at Twitter, we approached a third-party intermediary to arrange a briefing. Twitter was informed of the problem, and the issue appears to have been resolved as of May 20.”
Despite having his account reinstated, when McGee returned to Twitter on Wednesday it was to attack Musk, slamming the Twitter CEO for claiming he shared child abuse imagery. Instead McGee made another wild claim: that Musk’s decision to ban his account was based on a conspiracy theory McGee had shared about where former President Barack Obama was born.
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