What if most people are way more okay with child abuse than any of us imagine?
How else do you explain this?
For problems of considerable magnitude I always prefer to reach for the simpler explanation rather than the complex one. For instance: Twitter, one of the most popular social media sites in the world, appears to have a major problem with child sexual abuse material—Forbes calls it a “tidal wave” and a “nightmare” for the site—and my presumption in this case is a relatively simple one: Maybe the people who run Twitter, at least up until now, haven’t really had much of a problem with child sexual abuse and have even been sort of proactively okay with it. More broadly, maybe that’s actually true of society at large.
There is actually some compelling evidence to back this up. In Twitter’s case, it has come to light over the past week that its former director of “trust and safety,” a man named Yoel Roth, once argued in a PhD dissertation that gay hookup apps like Grindr should potentially be considered “loci for queer youth culture” and that these sex-based apps should contemplate their roles in “safely connecting queer young adults.” Well, gee, that seems like a really weird thing to say. That’s not even a major point in the dissertation but its presence there at all is just bizarre and inexplicable. Advocating that underage youth be given access to a service rightly known as a sex-hookup forum is very, very strange and alarming. I think people see this sort of thing in an academic paper and they’re apt to not recognize just how fully creepy it is—how unsettling it is that a man had a choice between saying, “Um, underage kids shouldn’t have access to a highly sexual gay hookup app in any way,” and “Um, maybe they should,” and he chose the latter.
At this point you might be asking yourself, for the sake of argument, “Well, is he wrong? If underage minors are already accessing this app, could it hurt to create a dedicated space for them on it where they’re less likely to be sexually abused?” Here is what feels like the very obvious rejoinder to that: The kids who want to access this app for inappropriate uses are not going to be interested in a toned-down “safe” side of the site; they’re not going to say to themselves, “Oh man, that’s just what I was after, a kids-only version of Grindr, now I’ll stop this dangerous and illegal behavior.” Adults need to stop being so mind-numbingly stupid in assuming this is how things work. Moreover—and this feels so obvious enough to be almost a priori knowledge—creating a kids-only version of a notoriously venereal hookup app is essentially a guarantee that more children will be sexually abused on it, both through (a) bringing more underage minors into the orbit of the app in the first place, and (b) assembling them in a convenient section of the app where predators can pick them out at will. It beggars belief that Yoel Roth was not aware of this when he wrote his dissertation.
Now, a reasonable response here would be: Well, okay, so one dude wrote something gross and creepy about underage participation on a sexual hookup app, but that doesn’t prove that his own apparent proclivities are broadly widespread or even that people are broadly willing to tolerate child sexual abuse at scale. But the proof here is more pervasive than you might initially think, and it’s kind of right out there in the open:
First, it was indeed just Yoel Roth that wrote this. But he had an adviser, and “graduate group chairperson,” and a dissertation committee, and they were all okay with it. Presumably all of these people read this paper and came across the part where Roth is like, “Hey maybe we should be okay with ‘youth’ being on a gay sex hookup app,” and they were either outright okay with it or if they had any problem with it then Roth somehow mollified them. All of those people were okay with it. And presumably there were more people at the University of Pennsylvania who read it after it was published there, and they were okay with it. In other words a bunch of credentialed, moneyed, well-connected, tenured Ivy League gatekeepers were fine with it. That’s extremely weird.
Twitter was apparently okay with it, as well. You might argue that it’s unlikely anybody at Twitter actually read this dissertation before hiring Yoel Roth. I suppose that’s possible. But it doesn’t seem probable. Any company that hires a guy for what was probably at least a $400k salaried position—probably more—is going to check him out, and that most assuredly includes his dissertation from his Ivy League university (particularly when that dissertation involves a tech product that’s at least adjacent to the same orbit as the company to which he’s applying). Like everyone else in the modern world, social media executives are neurotically risk-averse and absolutely terrified of negative press and attention. They check their people out, very thoroughly. They apparently saw nothing wrong in this argument that “queer youth” should have a place on an app that, as Vox put it, “make[s] finding sex easy.”
Perhaps most damningly, nobody seems to care about it now. Last week Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted out the relevant portion of Roth’s PhD and correctly noted that the man was “arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services.” Major media outlets like New York Magazine and Forbes reported on Musk’s tweet without actually addressing Roth’s bizarre and unsettling assertion; the Washington Post, meanwhile, on Monday defended Roth’s argument, characterizing it as a claim that apps like Grindr should offer underage minors “toned-down content alongside adult fare.” Again, it makes no sense to consider a “toned-down” version of an app like Grindr in the context of anything but sexual activity. That’s why Grindr exists! Imagine proposing that minors be given access to, I don’t know, Pornhub. “We’ll have safeguards in place. It’ll be a toned-down version of the adult side of the site.” If you don’t feel immediate, hostile suspicion at a proposal like that, you have honestly got to re-examine your presumptions about the way the world works.
So, to sum it up: A guy wrote a dissertation at a major American university that argued for children to be given a form of access to an adult sex hookup app; nobody at the university cared; nobody at the guy’s extremely prominent global corporation cared; nobody in the mainstream media seems to care. The impulse from everybody at every level of this tawdry scandal has been to either not care about it or even to actively defend it in oblique ways.
What does that mean? Only this: Maybe most people just don’t really care about child sexual abuse all that much. For a long time it’s been correctly viewed as among the most depraved and heinous crimes imaginable, but maybe for many institutions and people that’s just been sort of window-dressing, the kind of thing respectable people feel like they have to say to get along among a set of outwardly shared cultural assumptions. But when the rubber hits the road—like, when a guy says, “Hey, maybe underage minors should be allowed to have accounts on a hookup app”—apparently nobody can be bothered to care all that much. Could it be that’s the way it’s always been? Is broad support of child well-being and safety kind of a minority position?
This argument has, of course, become intensely politicized: Any forays into these discussions invariably lead to accusations of “QAnon conspiracy theories” involving Democrat-facilitated sex abuse networks and pedophilic pizza restaurants and whatever. Again, the simplest explanation is the best here. There’s no evidence at all to substantiate any of the PizzaGate/Alex Jones fever dreams. Here rather is the simple and brutal truth: Children are very vulnerable, and there are many depraved people in the world who want to exploit that vulnerability and harm them greatly. And maybe, just maybe, there are many more people who are more or less kind of okay with that.
That’s not hard to believe, not in an age where a man with that kind of dissertation can be in charge of the “trust and safety” division of one of the biggest companies in the world. No crazy conspiracy theories required; the facts seem sufficient enough.