Senator Tom Cotton Blasts Elon Musk’s X for Suppressing Revenge Porn Against a Democratic Candidate
Senator Tom Cotton seems to believe that the First Amendment covers revenge porn on and called out Elon Musk’s social media platform X for censorship.
At issue is a Democratic candidate for Virginia’s House of Delegates named Susanna Gibson, who performed sex acts with her husband on a subscription service called Chaturbate, as first reported by The Washington Post:
Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner and mother of two young children running in a highly competitive suburban Richmond district, streamed sex acts on Chaturbate, a platform that says it takes its name from “the act of masturbating while chatting online.”
Chaturbate videos are streamed live on that site and are often archived on other publicly available sites. More than a dozen videos of the couple captured from the Chaturbate stream were archived on one of those sites — Recurbate — in September 2022, after she entered the race. The most recent were two videos archived on Sept. 30, 2022. It is unclear when the live stream occurred.
The Washington Post’s Laura Vozzello revealed in her report that the outlet was first alerted to the public footage by a Republican operative and that the once-password-protected video had been ripped and put on a number of other free websites that feature porn. Perhaps not surprisingly, the leaked footage has since been shared by Gibson’s political rivals and presumably others.
Conservative outlet Washington Free Beacon tweeted a story about the leaked porn, which led X (formerly Twitter) to limit some of the account features. A tweet from Free Beacon EIC Eliana Johnson reveals a message showing that they were in violation of the social media rules regarding the s”posting or sharing of privately produced/distributed intimate media of someone without their express consent.”
Johnson shared the screenshot of that message, tagged Elon Musk, and asked, “what gives? This is a national news story, why can’t voters read about it on X?” Senator Tom Cotton then quote-posted and added, “Just like with Hunter’s laptop, it’s a mistake for @x to suppress stories that are inconvenient for Democrats.”
Of course, sharing digital pornographic imagery of individuals who have not consented probably was not part of the thinking of the original framers of the US Constitution. Nor does this rule only benefit one party or the other.
Editor’s note: the post has been updated since initially being published to clarify that Chaturbate is NOT a password-protected subscription service. Mediaite regrets the error but is also happy to report we are not fluent in such services.
