On Wednesday morning, renowned right-wing internet celebrities rallied in support of a fellow influencer after their account on X, formerly known as Twitter, was suspended.
Dom Lucre’s account was described by BBC writer Shayan Sardarizadeh as a “right-wing conspiracy theorist and QAnon adherent” who is “one of the top conspiracy accounts on Twitter,” with postings receiving millions of impressions on a regular basis.
At the time, it was unknown why the account had been suspended.
According to Elon Musk, who was responding to another user who asked for clarification on the ban, the account was suspended for “sharing child exploitation photographs related with an Australian man’s criminal conviction in the Philippines.”
Musk added a link to a CNN story about Peter Scully, who was sentenced to 129 years in jail last year for “sexually abusing children as young as 18 months.” The owner of X also explained that the photographs were detected by Twitter’s CSE team, which resulted in the ban.
Musk, on the other hand, went beyond just stating why Lucre’s account was suspended. He also stated that X would remove the posts and reactivate the account.
Child sexual exploitation is prohibited on most social media networks. In reality, X does as well, according to a policy that is still displayed on the website under the Twitter brand.
“We have a zero-tolerance child sexual exploitation policy on Twitter,” reads the policy page, before going on to reiterate this again. “Twitter has zero tolerance towards any material that features or promotes child sexual exploitation, one of the most serious violations of the Twitter Rules. This may include media, text, illustrated, or computer-generated images. Regardless of the intent, viewing, sharing, or linking to child sexual exploitation material contributes to the re-victimization of the depicted children.”
While the influencer’s media has been removed, his followers’ text exchanges with the deleted posts remain on the platform. Some of those posts mention a child as young as one and a half years old who is featured in the images.
The posts by the influencer appear to be part of a thread about Scully and his misdeeds. Regardless of purpose, it violates X’s stated policies and is illegal under federal law in the United States.
With Musk’s acquisition, the firm now known as X, as well as its owner, have declared that removing CSE material off its platform is a top priority. Many reports over the last year, however, have revealed how the corporation is failing to accomplish just that.