The Twitter Files

why they, and Musk, matter to me

Important Note: The term “child porn” is a euphemism that minimizes the reality of what is happening, similar to saying “top surgery” instead of “elective double mastectomy.” I invite readers to consider saying “pictures and videos of child sexual abuse,” “images of children being molested,” “videos of children being raped,” or otherwise using accurate, specific language about this topic. In a Twitter-like situation of limited characters, alternatives to “child porn” include CSE (child sexual exploitation) or CSAM (child sexual abuse material).

Elon Musk Deserves Respect

It was an open secret—among just about all the people who pay attention to the issue of online child sexual exploitation—that Twitter, for years, was a primary source for this depravity.

Since I published my very long essay on the topic of pedophilia almost a year ago, several activists in this arena made contact with me and told me about this problem and how bad it was. There were several Twitter hashtags, a primary one and several secondary ones, that were used by pedophiles and other deviants to share pictures and videos of children being molested and raped. Twitter, pre-Musk, was fully aware that this was happening.

Here’s a NY Post article from January 2021 detailing one case, where Twitter was informed repeatedly and it took lawyers to get them to remove it. I mention that one only because it establishes beyond all doubt that Twitter was fully aware of what was happening. But it was not the only case. It was not the worst case.

We all know what Twitter was focused on in 2020—and it wasn’t protecting children from having the pictures and videos of their sexual abuse spread widely.

Twitter knew. They just didn’t care. They put resources elsewhere, and they knew they were making this choice. Click play to hear part of a recent Twitter Spaces that included Eliza Bleu, an activist on this issue; a Twitter employee whose efforts to address the problem were thwarted under Twitter 1.0, and Musk, discussing Twitter 1.0’s monstrous failure.

Basic Schwab Leader President Dr RollerGator PhD @drrollergator

Elon Musk has prioritized removing this depravity from Twitter.

Twitter 2.0 is actively looking for them, to boot them off the platform. Twitter 2.0 is removing those accounts as fast as they can, each time they’re located.

Under Musk, those hashtags are no longer being used to further victimize children who have already been molested or raped by allowing the pictures and videos of their molestation and rape to be spread among perverts.

Those kids, when they are old enough to understand what happened to the pictures and videos of their abuse, will have to live with the fact that Twitter 1.0 prioritized banning people for misgendering, saying “OK Groomer,” and other words, instead of protecting them. They will also have to live with the fact that, as the most recent Twitter Files installment shows, the FBI prioritized going after twitter accounts with 3-digit followers telling jokes about “voting on Wednesday” (instead of Tuesday), over protecting them from further victimization.

The one part of their story that will be available to bring them any kind of peace is that Elon Musk, a father, bought Twitter and gave a damn and did his best to stop their trauma from continuing to be masturbation material for perverts.

Elon Musk is a rather odd individual who is a unique position. I don’t agree with all his choices so far and I will likely not agree with all of them going forward.

But he deserves, and has, my undying gratitude for prioritizing this crucial, morally mandatory task in a way that Twitter 1.0 never did.

Why The Twitter Files Wrecked My Sleep For A Week

Recently, for about a week, I found myself in an unusually intense state of emotional and psychological stress, including serious disassociation and nonexistent frustration tolerance. My going through very difficult periods of confusing, hard-to-tolerate levels of psychological pain is nothing new, but I usually have some idea why. Even if I can’t pinpoint an exact reason, I usually have a vague sense of what it relates to, at the very least.

It took a 24-hour digital Sabbath—I was offline almost entirely for a 24 hour period last weekend—to figure out.

I was experiencing intense psychological stress because of the Twitter files. I talked to two friends of similar background, and they were experiencing it too, to varying degrees.

Why write about it? Because some of you may be experiencing it, as well, and not have the language for it. Those of you who are blessed to lack the context for this might know people experiencing it, and it might help you understand them.

The End of Gaslighting

The Twitter Files are revealing the reality of what was going on at Twitter:

• Twitter was actively suppressing conservative and centrist voices, while denying it did so.

• It was suspending people it admitted had broken no rules, like Libs of TikTok.

• It was doing its best to find pretenses to suspend people whose morality it judged inferior to their Woke shibboleths.

• The FBI was focused on low-followers accounts telling jokes, not real problems, and Twitter was acting as an FBI subsidiary to suppress the free speech of Americans.

• Twitter’s employees were fully committed to the laughably narcissistic notion that they were both worthy and capable of deciding which human beings should be allowed to talk to each other, and about what, and enforcing their decisions at scale.

All of these notions were part of the baseline assumptions—the set of axioms officially assumed to be true—by almost everyone I know in anti-Woke circles.

I am struggling to express how bizarre it is for me and others who grew up being gaslit to deal with this much validation, with this ongoing series of evidence and admissions affirming that:

Yes, reality is real.

Yes, what was happening is exactly and precisely what we thought was happening.

Yes, the previous accusations of “conspiracy theory” and “persecution complex” and all the rest were bullshit—and furthermore, Twitter knew they were bullshit.

There is a part of me that is still primarily shaped by having grown up in a Cluster B home. A mental separation between reality and what you know, or think you know, that everyone else sees is a survival skill for children with abusive parents, who walk around understanding that other people have no idea of the deepest truths of their lives.

Often children who manage to disclose, at least in part, that they are being abused are not believed. There are ways in which that can be as damaging as the abuse itself. Bruises on a backside eventually heal, but someone telling you that you’re lying about how you got your bruises hurts your soul and your perception of how worthy you are to be trusted, accepted, and protected.

Bruises heal a lot faster.

If this happens enough when you’re a little kid, your ability to trust yourself can be profoundly damaged. It can take a lot for a little kid who grows up that way to trust that he or she is even capable of recognizing, much less articulating, reality.

The word ‘gaslighting’ gets overused these days, but it is still a thing. When a little girl—who knows that she didn’t get hurt by falling down and that she didn’t get a urinary tract infection from failing to wipe herself properly—hears adults discussing these “alternative facts” as if they’re reality, she is being gaslit. Little kids are vulnerable and malleable, and when enough adults state that a thing is real, act as if it’s real, and make choices for her life as if they are real, it is extraordinarily difficult for her to fully trust herself that they are not, in fact, real.

To hold on to what she thinks she knows is real is not an easy thing, and by the time she’s old enough to have the cognitive capacity to tell herself, “they’re lying,” it’s a steeply uphill battle. She has, at that point, already been dealing with this for years. Her mental infrastructure for trusting herself has been systematically damaged by the people who were supposed to be helping her build it.

The Twitter Files proving, over and over again, that so many aspects of our “conspiracy theories” were in fact reality, is a confusing episode of mental and emotional vertigo for those of us who aren’t used to having our experiences and feelings validated.

It’s a wonderful, thrilling, profoundly difficult thing. Part of me doesn’t trust it; part of me is certain that it’s temporary, it will be taken away, it can’t possibly last. Having reality validated is, above all, confusing.

So confusing that it took me a week to even recognize it, but I’m glad I do now, and if some of you—or people you know—have also been a little weirded out by it, perhaps what I’ve written here can help you understand why.

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