For many of its users, Twitter’s lack of an edit function is a source of continuing frustration. After all, there’s nothing worse than posting a tweet and immediately noticing the glaring typo on the first line.
For others, though, it goes beyond being able to cover up an embarrassing spelling mistake. Because sometimes, to their immediate regret, elite Twitter users tweet things that they fairly quickly wish they hadn’t. The internet, as they say, is forever.
Ellen Pao, who gained infamy overseeing Reddit’s lurch towards censorship during her brief tenure as CEO of the site in 2015, claims she knew Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein supplied underage girls as sex toys for the rich & powerful — and said nothing.
Well, to be fair, she wasn’t dumb enough to say exactly that. But other users were quick to follow the implications of what she did say.
The former CEO, who previously worked for venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, said Maxwell was invited to a party at the company, and that she was aware of her reputation.
“She was at the Kleiner holiday party in 2011, but I had no desire to meet her much less have a photo taken with her,” said Pao in her tweet.
“We knew about her supplying underage girls for sex, but I guess that was fine with the “cool” people who managed the tightly controlled guest list.”
Um. What?
Perhaps realizing how her original tweet looked, Pao also made a follow-up tweet clarifying her original statement.
“To be clear, the press had described her as supplying underage girls for sex, but she had not been charged so I guess it would be more accurate to say we “suspected” v “knew.”
Pao quickly scrubbed the tweet in a vain attempt to avoid scrutiny, or perhaps merely following the PR adage that it’s better to keep your mouth shut that open it wider for your other foot. But you’d think the former CEO of a tech company would be aware of things like the internet archive.
Certainly, you could argue that merely being aware of even just accusations about powerful business figures being involved in trafficking underage girls, and not saying anything, shouldn’t be any kind of crime.
Try and tell that to clergy arrested and jailed for not reporting what they knew.
The churches have been hung out to dry, not just for harbouring paedophiles in their midst, but for failing to act on what they knew. Many professionals are legally obligated to report even a suspicion of abuse.
So, why should the CEO of a hugely powerful and influential corporation be immune to the same standards?
Especially a puritanical, leftist witchfinder-general like Pao, a “woke” peddler of racial and feminist grievance. In fact, Pao is such a dedicated inquisitor that she maintained a “resentment chart” Excel spreadsheet of everyone who had ever slighted her.
Yet her dedication to hunting down and punishing slights never extended to doing anything about someone she says she knew was a paedophile sex trafficker?
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