Censorship advocates find home in child porn-ridden social network
Censorship advocates who fled Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s purchase of the company have found a home in a social network reportedly dominated by pedophiles and child porn.
Several celebrities and mainstream media reporters have moved over to Mastodon, a decentralized social platform where users can set up their own communities and join others. Many have cited Musk’s lifting of censorship as their reason for departure.
The View’s Whoopi Goldberg, for instance, is “tired of now having certain kinds of attitudes blocked now getting back on.” Others who have joined Mastodon are New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman, environment messianist Greta Thunberg, CNN operatives Jim Acosta and Donie Sullivan, Washington Post operatives Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell, and others.
A recent Secjuice report found that Mastodon’s largest communities — called “instances” — are purveyors of child porn, including the second- and third-place communities on the leaderboard. There are also pedophile “support rooms," such as one named “NNIA Space (Non Normative Identities Alliance)” and another called “Pedo School”.
“Mastodon instances are populated by social media users whose sexual tastes are too extreme or illegal for mainstream social media platforms, and over time these social media users have found a safe harbour on Mastodon,” writes Secjuice. “The largest community of pedophiles on the internet call Mastodon their home and consider Mastodon a safe space for child porn,” the publication added after an investigation found several disturbing instances dedicated to child exploitation.
But it appears the elite Twitter refugees are less concerned about sharing a platform dominated by predators than they are with censoring “bigotry”.
Frontline News previously reported it took less than a month for utopian journalists to turn Mastodon community journa.host into another version of pre-Musk Twitter where they attack and censor each other.
In November, news podcast The Gist host Mike Pesca posted a link to a Times article about “health concerns associated with the puberty-blocking drugs sometimes prescribed to transgender youths.” Pesca commented, “This seemed like careful, thorough reporting.”
Another journalist, Parker Molloy, immediately accused Pesca of “anti-trans bigotry” and angrily demanded that the platform’s creator remove the post. A journa.host administrator chimed in to agree with Malloy.
Journa.host decided to suspend Pesca, not because of the post, but because he referred to Malloy as an “activist,” which was seen as “dismissive”.
Shortly after, Molloy herself was suspended from the platform for her posts.
“I mostly just want to be left alone,” she posted on Mastodon.
