Thread by @JFGariepy

Is this man a pimp, and if so, does that make him a human trafficker, and if so, should pictures of his prostitutes be banned on Twitter?

Time for the ultimate🧵taking you to the epistemological limit of pimping, where lies a fractal of men exploiting women exploiting men.

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Being a teenager of the 90s, I have fond memories of old school rap songs in which rappers would brag about being a "P.i.m.p.," sometimes spending lyrical efforts at accentuating the capitalization of the letter P. As a Frenchman, I would not fully realize what they meant.

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I assumed they were simply bragging about being desirable men surrounded by many women. One Ph. D. and decades later, I realized watching the No Jumper podcast with Lil Kelpy and @theonlysharp that the bragging might, in some cases, have meant they were,..

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..indeed, actual pimps, who were actually participating in the management of, so-called, "stables" of actual prostitutes.

I'm bringing up this subject because of the recent Twitter drama around Eliza, which led to the banning of #FreeBrittanyVenti & #FreeTheQuartering.

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The story was so hard for me to figure out (possibly because of the censorship around it on Twitter), that a thread was needed to lay it out in full.

Eliza is a Twitter employee who has risen to fame as part of the takeover of Twitter by @elonmusk. You may have heard..

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..the story of a woman who didn't get fired as part of the mass layoff, and who had for years wanted to combat child exploitation on Twitter, but it took Elon to allow her to do it. That would be her, and this drive was covered in the mainstream:

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…

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More recently, an Internet-driven campaign developed spontaneously on social media looking into the past of Eliza, and this campaign became critical of her self-identification as a Human Trafficking Survivor Advocate. Specifically, Eliza has been claiming the following:

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"The term “human trafficking” is an umbrella term that includes both labor trafficking and sex trafficking."

https://twitter.com/elizableu/status/1609548183377510400

"My worst fear of stepping forward as a survivor of human trafficking was that I’d never get married..."

https://twitter.com/elizableu/status/1610288224626266114

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"I’m not currently at liberty to speak about Andrew Tate or his Brother. I haven’t been for many months. That’s all I’m going to say about that right now."

https://twitter.com/elizableu/status/1608607573183463424

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Michael Tracey criticized her as putting forward "a long, hazy tale of allegedly being trafficked by a 'high-profile musician' into what she calls 'the game,' which then she voluntarily left and re-entered, only to be trafficked again [...]"

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1610008103390519301

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The game, here, would presumably be some form of sexual exploitation/prostitution.

The free crowds of the Internet began developing suspicions, questioning whether she had simply engaged in prostitution consensually, and only later, was reframing it as human trafficking.

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Michael Tracey complained that there were "zero independent verification anywhere of her extravagant, salacious claims."

Eventually, a hip-hop video of iCandy called "Eliza Knows" from 2016 resurfaced. It was published by World Star Hip-Hop. In it, Eliza appears to..

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..perform sensual and salacious dancing, but the video, at first glance, would look like a professional music clip, consensually filmed with a performing artist, who happens to be Eliza.

Users posted screenshots of the video in the hope of developing an argument that..

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..Eliza was more consensually involved in the sexualization of herself than would be suggested by the term "human trafficking survivor."

But users were shocked to find that Twitter eventually froze their accounts, asking deletion of their tweets for them to be reinstated.

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People then tried to link to the YouTube video in the hope of making their point; but Twitter added a warning for anyone clicking on those links. Brittany Venti and The Quartering are two of the accounts still frozen due to these events.

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Eliza made the statement below 3 days ago about these events. Amazingly, the community was able to use the "add context" feature to make their point that the photo was coming from a WSHH video that had been published online since 2016.

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If I am to summarize what I think the point of Eliza would be, it might go as follows:

1. Prostitution with a pimp is sex trafficking, sex trafficking is human trafficking. Since my pimp was part of the causal route leading me to film this hip-hop video, it is a video..

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..of human trafficking.

2. Publishing screenshots of this video therefore falls within the Twitter rules against non-consensual publishing of privately-taken pictures.

If I am to summarize the objection that could come from the Internet, it might go as follows:

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1. You are a public figure who is leading a political project. As such, past artistic contributions of you are relevant to criticize your stance, evaluate your credibility and help people judge the facts.

2. The only standard making these photos private is merely your..

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..state of mind, in which in retrospect you claim was exploitative, but your willing participation to this video as an artistic production is evidence that you were doing it consensually.

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So, where does the truth lie? Are all prostitutes with a pimp victim of extortion and human exploitation? Do they have a share in causing their own fate? I do not have answers to these questions. But they strike at the heart of the leftist conception of exploitation.

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It is not rare to hear a leftist claim that all work is exploitation, and that the very fact that the human condition bounds us to death if we do not occupy some place in society is a form of constraint.

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In any case, this story highlights the unenforceability of the privately-taken non-consensual media rule of Twitter. By these standards, the tape showing Trump claiming that "they'll let you do it," might have been impossible to publish on Twitter.

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My suggestion to @elonmusk, therefore, would be to abolish the private media rule. This rule constitutes a grave legal liability as it subjects Twitter to an obligation to act in response to legal threats by aggrieved parties who have nothing else than their alleged..

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..statement of mind to justify their claims.

Therefore the most rational course is to abolish the private media rule and benefit from the full protection of Section 230 as a platform that minimally intervenes in content moderation.

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*correction: I labeled Eliza as a Twitter employee when perhaps a person within Twitter circles might be a better characterization as I do not know the nature of her work to control exploitation on Twitter.

Supplement: if all it takes is the state of mind of "being exploited" to justify a ban of embarrassing information, wouldn't every single Project Veritas hidden camera video qualify as bannable?

Consider that the Project Veritas videos do rely on sexual exploitation. Many of these men are caught being honest on video merely because the PV journalist is cute.