..
Reddit fires controversial transgender activist linked to
two pedophilia scandals after users revolt
25 Mar, 2021 07:59
(L) Reddit logos; (R) Aimee Challenor © (L) Dado Ruvic / Reuters; (R) aimeechallenor / Instagram
An online revolt has forced Reddit to fire a newly hired administrator, Aimee Challenor, a transgender activist and former politician who had been previously suspended by two UK political parties over pedophilia scandals.
“As of today, the employee in question is no longer employed by Reddit,” the platform’s CEO Steve Huffman wrote in a Reddit post on Wednesday, referring to Challenor.
“We did not adequately vet her background before formally hiring her,” he said.
Huffman wrote that Reddit initially tried to shield Challenor from possible harassment by banning one of its own moderators for posting a link to a media article about her, and by deleting the link. The company then acknowledged its mistake and reinstated the moderator, promising to update its harassment policy.
“We did not operate to our own standards here. We will do our best to do better for you,” Huffman wrote.
Tech news website The Verge reported that more than 200 subreddits, including the popular ones like the 27-million-member forum r/Music, set their status to private in protest against Challenor’s hiring. Users highlighted controversies involving Challenor in the UK, with one message describing her as “a supporter of child rape.”
Challenor did not comment on the termination. She earlier wrote “Stop hating me. I’m just trying to make a living. #stophate #redditqueen” on her Instagram account. Her Twitter account was made private.
Astonishing:
Before joining Reddit, Challenor, a transgender woman, was the UK Green Party’s equalities spokesperson and a candidate for deputy leader. She was suspended in 2018, when her father, David Challenor, was jailed for 22 years for torturing and raping a 10-year-old girl, who he held captive in his attic, and for taking photos of the abuse. A scandal erupted after it became known that Challenor’s father acted as party’s election agent after he was arrested and charged with a sex crime.
Challenor claimed that she did not know anything about her father’s crimes and later was unaware of the details of the charges brought against him. “On reflection, I can understand that it was unacceptable for me to appoint my dad as my election agent when he had been arrested,” she said at the time.
The woman then left the Greens, accusing the party of “falling behind” in advancing the rights of transgender people and of failing to protect its own transgender members from transphobia.
The activist eventually joined the UK’s Liberal Democrats, but got suspended in 2019 – this time in relation to tweets posted on her fiance Nathaniel Knight’s account. According to the Sunday Times, one tweet read: “I fantasize about children having sex, sometimes with adults, sometimes with other children, sometimes kidnapped and forced into bad situations.”
Another tweet said that the fantasies were “make-believe and imaginary,” and that “I fantasise about things I don’t want to do in real life.”
Challenor argued that the account was hacked. “Both my partner and I condemn in the strongest ways possible the messages in those comments. We were shocked and sickened by them,” she told the British newspaper, adding that she had decided to quit politics.
That's the first good idea! It's amazing how easily she got hired by two political parties and a major website. Why is that? Is there an attitude that trans people are always good? Some people think there is an association between mental illness and gender dysphoria.
=====================================================================================
The EU needs to allow companies to detect online child abuse
By Maud de Boer
Euractiv
As tough inter-institutional negotiations continue in Brussels, Maud de Boer Buquicchio says that the EU must continue to allow companies to detect and report child sexual abuse online - both known and new images, as well as instances of grooming.
Maud de Boer Buquicchio is a former UN Special Rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children, and current president of Missing Children Europe.
If you asked any number of people in Europe if they believed it was desirable for the European Union to make it easier for paedophiles to contact children, they would probably wonder if you had taken leave of your senses. If you asked if it was a good thing to make it harder to detect and delete images of children being raped, the same people might think something similar.
Yet since 21 December 2020 that is precisely what has been happening. Companies that previously were voluntarily deploying child protection tools, taking steps to detect paedophile activity so they could step in to stop it, gave up doing so. Some companies that had previously been voluntarily looking for child sex abuse material likewise gave up.
Not anywhere else in the world. Only in the EU’s 27 member states. Not all companies, but Facebook did. As their messenger platform is host to most of these crime scenes, this was particularly disappointing.
This was not intended. It was an unforeseen consequence of part of the e-Privacy Directive, a measure adopted in 2018 and which entered into force in December.
Three months before that was due to happen the European Commission realised this terrible problem was heading down the wrong track. They published a proposal to put it right in the form of a temporary derogation. If adopted, this derogation would restore the previous status quo.
Children would be safer. You would have thought everyone concerned would have eagerly grabbed at any solution that did that. But no. It appears that delaying and blocking tactics deployed by European Parliament’s negotiating team hamper any progress in the political dialogue between the EU institutions. There can be only one objective: no derogation.
The European Council has already come a long way, with a number of important concessions to the European Parliament. All additional proposals by the Parliament, presented as privacy protection safeguards, but in reality, making the use of these ineffective tools, will ultimately make this temporary derogation meaningless and lead companies to stop using these technologies altogether, putting children at huge risk.
When a balance of interests is to be performed – as the legislators are called for in this temporary derogation – there should be no doubt that child safety should always be a primary consideration, and hence prevail.
All kinds of misinformation are being circulated to try to justify their inaction.
For example, it is constantly being suggested that innocent people in Europe were being falsely accused and harmed by the way these tools were working: Innocent families sharing holiday photos of children playing on the beach were being incriminated. Yet not one single example of such an occurrence has been produced, whereas there are literally tens of thousands of examples of how these tools are doing good, for example by getting child sex abuse images removed from the internet or detecting and stopping paedophile behaviour.
I cannot help feeling that if leading politicians and the media were not so heavily focused on the calamity of COVID-19, the problem would have been solved in the twinkling of an eye. After all, there is no necessary or inevitable opposition between the two principles of protecting children and protecting privacy. They can be reconciled.
Why do I say that? Because we know exactly what has happened as a result of the paralysis that set in last December. The number of reports of child sex abuse emanating from the EU has fallen by 51%. EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson estimated that this meant 650 reports per day are not being made that previously would have been. We may never know how many individual European children are continuing to be sexually abused or groomed because technology fails to detect it, but I am absolutely certain that number is greater than zero.
The EU needs to continue to allow companies to detect and report child sexual abuse online – both known and new images – as well as instances of grooming. The EU needs to continue to allow the use of the existent technology to swiftly detect patterns indicating ongoing grooming online. EU legislators need to allow companies to help prevent paedophiles making more victims of these unspeakable crimes.
There is another political trilogue approaching where this matter could be put right and the status quo restored. All political leaders need to ensure that is exactly what happens, failing which the European Parliament should be held accountable for any further delay and the heavy toll that EU Children will pay.
No comments:
Post a Comment