It’s only the latest incident of banned imagery making its way onto the site since Musk bought it. Twitter came under renewed fire Thursday over its handling of child sex abuse imagery after it reinstated the account of a right-wing influencer who had tweeted an image of a toddler being tortured. After some of the account’s more than 500,000 followers complained that the account had been suspended for its political messaging, Twitter owner Elon Musk responded Wednesday by saying that it was because of the image. “Only people on our CSE team have seen those pictures,” Musk tweeted, referring to the company’s child sexual exploitation staff. “For now, we will delete those posts and reinstate the account.” In fact, the image in question had drawn more than 3 million views and 8,000 retweets, according to Twitter statistics on a cached version of the tweet from Tuesday. Experts said that even photos that are partially obscured, such as the image shared by the influencer, typically qualify as illegal child sex abuse material, or CSAM. “Generally speaking, even if it is redacted, if it’s clear it’s a child, it’s still CSAM,” said Gavin Portnoy, vice president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the congressionally chartered nonprofit that is the nation’s clearinghouse for battling child victimization. Musk and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.
via washington post: Twitter under fire for reinstating account that posted child sex abuse