Elon Musk smeared Twitter's former head of trust and safety by baselessly claiming he supports child sexualization

• Elon Musk falsely claimed that Twitter's ex-safety head supports the sexualization of children.
• Musk posted an excerpt from Yoel Roth's PhD thesis about "Gay Data" and misconstrued it.

Elon Musk smeared Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, by falsely and baselessly claiming that he supports the sexualization of children, in a tweet on Saturday.

Musk posted a snippet of Roth's 2016 PhD dissertation from the University of Pennsylvania titled "Gay Data" and said: "Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis."

The research paper is about Grindr, the location-based social networking app, targeted at LGBTQ+ people. In the excerpt Musk posted, Roth advocated for social platforms like Grindr to become safe spaces for queer youth under the age of 18.

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Roth wrote that Grindr is not "a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers," but since queer youth already use it, such platforms "should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases."

Musk was responding to Eliza Bleu, a human trafficking survivor, who had dug up an old tweet by Roth from 2010 that said: "Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?"

Bleu misconstrued the tweet and wrote "I think I may have found the problem @elonmusk," referring to the issue of child sexual abuse material on Twitter. Musk initially responded by saying: "This explains a lot."

Roth did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment about Musk's accusations outside of normal working hours.

Roth was the most senior member of Twitter's trust and safety team after executive Vijaya Gadde was fired by Musk on his first day as CEO. Roth then resigned from his position in the early days of Musk's tenure, and said in an op-ed for the New York Times that "Twitter was actually safer under Mr. Musk than it was before."

Roth further said at a conference that it's "unfair" to paint Musk as the "villain" in Twitter's story because that "wasn't my experience with him."

Musk released the second part of his Twitter Files series last week, which he said will lift the lid on free speech suppression on the platform. Conservative journalist Bari Weiss said that Roth, Gadde, and other Twitter executives were part of a secret group that made the biggest and "most politically sensitive decisions" about what tweets would be allowed on Twitter.

Musk then insinuated that executives including Roth were making "controversial decisions," often "without getting Jack's [Dorsey] approval."

"The inmates were running the asylum," he added.