Pizzagate conspiracies salesman Jack Posobiec published the picture and location of employment of the 14-year-old victim of alleged sexual assault by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore on Friday.
Leigh Corfman, an assistant district attorney in 1979 who claimed to The Washington Post that Moore had sexually abused her when she was a teenager, was doxxed by Posobiec.
Posobiec gained notoriety for promoting the Pizzagate hoax, which said without evidence that the Clinton campaign was operating a child sex operation in the attic of a pizzeria without a basement. A few months later, his account received Twitter’s verified blue check mark, which is typically only granted to well-known people and celebrities and is given out at the company’s discretion.
A request for comment about Posobiec’s doxxing was not answered by Twitter. “We do not comment on individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons,” is the company’s response to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment on harassment-related queries in 2017.
Just last month, the business said that it would be “clearer about these policies and decisions in the future.” Within an hour after that declaration, the business refused to respond when questioned about Posobiec’s position as a verified user.
Posobiec replied, “It came from Heavy dot com – why aren’t you mass reporting them?” in response to Twitter users flagging his account for targeted abuse.
But as Posobiec’s Twitter timeline shows, Heavy.com did not spend the most of Thursday and Friday attacking and smearing Corfman.
He tweeted on Friday morning, “Be a shame if the #RoyMooreChildMolester story turned out to be another false accusation after so many reporters have gone all in on it.”
Posobiec then gave an explanation for removing the tweet.
“I noticed the provided facts while reading the Heavy article. The post on Facebook was made public. I took it down out of respect for the accuser since I now think it wasn’t a smart idea to share it myself,” he added.
Giving personal information about a user is usually one of Twitter’s least selectively enforced policies, even though the service has received harsh criticism from users, the media, and congressional investigators for not doing more to curb targeted abuse and misinformation.
Rose McGowan accused Harvey Weinstein of rape last month, and her Twitter account was taken down within hours. Twitter immediately terminated McGowan’s account after claiming she had posted a phone number.
However, Posobiec’s tweet, which included the accuser of Moore’s personal information, was up for hours before he deleted it. No suspension ever occurred on his account.
When asked on Thursday what it would take to remove President Trump’s account from the platform, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, responded.
“If an individual on a public platform were to be harassed and attacked,” he said.
According to former workers, Twitter has a harassment queue with “one slower-moving line, and one high-priority ‘VIP’ line for verified users and Twitter employees’ favorite accounts,” as reported by Kelly Weill of The Daily Beast late last month.
Posobiec gained notoriety last year when he livestreamed himself into a birthday celebration for a toddler at Comet Ping Pong Pizza.
Reddit users and 4chan users mistakenly concluded that if one were to substitute phrases like “pizza” with “little girl” and “map” with “semen,” an intricate secret code in Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s compromised emails would disclose a hidden child sex ring. Posobiec was “gently refused service and asked to leave” at the pizza, The Washington Post said.
A few weeks later, Edgar M. Welch opened fire on the same pizzeria, claiming to have seen the fictitious child sex ring in the basement. Welch, who is now serving a four-year jail sentence, claimed to have read a great deal about the pedophile ring claims on the internet.
Following Twitter’s blue authenticity check of Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville white supremacist gathering that resulted in the death of an anti-racist protestor, yesterday, the social media platform suspended the verification process for all accounts. Kessler’s account is still legitimate.
