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- Yoel Roth slammed Elon Musk's decision to reinstate a user that posted a child torture image.
- The ex-head of trust and safety said the decision contradicts the company's policies.
- The account was suspended for four days before Musk reinstated it on Wednesday.
Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, took a dig at Elon Musk's decision to reinstate an account that had posted an obscured image of a toddler being tortured.
"Have been tagged a few times on this one, so let me just say: It's insane to write 'we have zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation' while also arbitrarily reinstating accounts that share CSAM," Roth posted on the social media site BlueSky on Wednesday, referring to child sexual abuse material.
X — formerly known as Twitter — reinstated the account of Dominick McGee, who had reportedly posted the image that appeared to violate the company's policy on such material. The Washington Post reported on the posting of the image, which the publication said had been obscured from the original; McGee told the publication he'd posted the image to draw attention to child sex trafficking, the Post reported.
McGee is an online personality popular among far-right conservative circles and QAnon conspiracy theorists. He told Insider that he had only shared a news article and not child pornography.
"He was scapegoating. I shared a news article and the headline for it," McGee said in a direct message, calling out Musk. "The mainstream media is labeling this scenario as if I shared CP. I shared a news article that covered the story. It's unfair but it is what it is."
The Post reported that the video from which the image was taken was reportedly made by Peter Scully, an Australian man who has been sentenced to life in prison plus 129 years in the Philippines last year for sexually abusing children as young as 18-months-old, as well as for human trafficking and rape.
Meanwhile, McGee, who has more than 600,000 followers on X, was suspended from the site for four days, but his account was reinstated on Wednesday.
Musk said on X that the social media company's child sexual exploitation team had seen the image and the account had been "suspended for posting child exploitation pictures."
X has a "zero tolerance" policy when it comes to child sexual exploitation and considers it "one of the most serious violations of the Twitter Rules," according to its website. Users are prohibited from "viewing, sharing, or linking to child sexual exploitation material," the website says.
"For now, we will delete those posts and reinstate the account," Musk wrote on X, after McGee's suspension brought backlash from his right-wing supporters and a number of "Free Dom" posts.
Roth, the site's former head of trust and safety, wrote on BlueSky that he found Musk's decision to be confusing.
"I'm sorry, just have to post a big ol' lol about the fact that this guy blew up my life by saying I condone pedophilia, and then he turns around and does this," Roth wrote on the rival site.
Roth has said he was forced to flee his home last year after Musk baselessly implied in more than one tweet that Roth had a permissive view of pedophilia — a tactic commonly employed by the QAnon conspiracy movement and one Musk has used before. In 2018, the Tesla CEO famously called a British cave diver who helped rescue a group of boys that were trapped in a cave a "pedo" on Twitter, spawning a defamation lawsuit that Musk later won.
Roth had worked on Twitter's trust and safety team for more than seven years before he resigned in November following Musk's acquisition of the company.
During the first few weeks of the billionaire's takeover, Roth repeatedly tried to assuage people's concerns about Twitter under Musk's leadership and was even publicly defended by the Twitter owner at one point.
But after resigning from the role two weeks into Musk's ownership, Roth changed his tune. Last year, he said he does not believe there are enough employees left at the company who understand trust and safety to moderate Twitter effectively after the billionaire cut more than half of the company's workforce.
Roth and a spokesperson for X did not respond to a request for comment from Insider ahead of publication.
Meanwhile, McGee told the Post that he believed he was suspended by X for a negative post about former president Barack Obama — and that the image of the toddler was a "scapegoat."