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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29265 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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NY Mag published a piece defending Yoel Roth from Musk's "smears", declaring that Musk "falsely implied" that Roth had advocated for normalising child sexualisation in his old tweets.

Turns out, he's apparently a Zionist too! Wonder how this will sit with sections of the left rigorously defending Roth knowing that he probably lobbies for an apartheid state, or the rigorously pro-Israel right exposing his bizarre tweets. And I doubt Musk is in any way interested in exposing the Israeli lobby.

Who is Roth, why should I care what Elon says about him, and why on YHWH’s green Earth does it matter that he’s a Zionist?

There’s people in this world who don’t care about your fixation on the Jews.

Roth was head of moderation on Twitter. Guy who bragged about meeting with FBI so he could take orders on what to delete.

Helped bury the Biden scandal, apparently. Is being blamed for CP takedowns being slow on twitter.

Also has a suggestive twitter account, a now-deleted pornographic alt (otterriffic) , and a thesis about getting fucked on grindr, which includes some unfortunate musing about how to accomodate teenagers on that particular sex app. (excluding them would be unfortunate in his view).

/images/16708672255544415.webp

To be fair, I think the screengrab is taking the full thesis a little out of context. For the full paragraph:

These accounts echo many of the classic tropes of online child safety narratives: the essentially dangerous nature of new media; the need to impose strict, top-down controls on how minors use the internet; a digital reincarnation of “stranger danger” in the figure of the older male sexual predator; and the importance of raising children to be safety-savvy and highly private. Yet, absent from these discussions is even a cursory recognition that the new medium of gay-targeted social networking may be a crucial social outlet for gay, bisexual, and questioning youth. While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18. Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.

((Grindr argued at length that it wasn't 'just' a hookup app at this time, probably more to avoid getting Apple'd than anything else.))

I think Roth treats the problem of minor access to adult services a little too blithely for his role, but I think there's a more plausible read where he was arguing in favor of either a Grindr-run non-adult service, or (preferentially) a different party running strictly safe social content available for younger people. The latter has a lot of problems, both the obvious and the not-obvious, but sites like that have existed in ways that didn't immediately devolve into hookup forums; they largely just didn't make the transition from phpBB to modern social media well if at all.

I'm leaning more towards Roth being a horny, not very smart guy who fucked up and was thus deemed safe enough to be used for an important job, rather than him being some sinister sicko.

But who knows.

Really highlights the importance of "not being horny on main", had he simply completely segregated his horny stuff, he'd not have to worry now much apart from perhaps having to run away from Israel over the censorship issue.

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