X marks the victim
How Musk-era Twitter let down sexual abuse victims amidst the largest YouTuber scandal in years
(As an additional content warning for people who know nothing about the MrBeast situation, this post contains screenshots of transphobic language. The first content warning is in the subtitle.)
If you have had the misfortune of browsing Twitter after its acquisition by Elon Musk, you may have been frustrated by the platform’s hard pivot toward right-wing politics. A 2023 report from Pew Research Center unsurprisingly found that increasingly more Republican Twitter users believe it to be good for democracy, an observation that can only be contextualized by the anti-democratic beliefs and policies of their political party. The same report detailed Democratic users’ increasing concerns about harassment. With alt-right outrage machines like Libs of TikTok on the rise and Musk’s constant efforts to boost their engagement statistics, Twitter has effectively estranged itself from polite society.
This brings me to today, where Jimmy Donaldson, the face of the MrBeast company and YouTube channel, finds himself embroiled in a myriad of scandals. The list includes the exploitation of employees, contestants, and slave labor at the time I am writing this, but I want to focus on a situation involving his former friend and crew member, Ava Kris Tyson, as it unraveled on Twitter.
LavaGS
In July 2024, third-party YouTubers uncovered explicit interactions on Ava Tyson’s Discord server that occurred between her and a minor who went by the username LavaGS—Lava was 13 at the time while Ava was 20. When the news broke, Lava initially denied the grooming allegations that followed but partially walked his statements back, condemning the interactions but stopping short of the full allegations.
However, the Twitter users that paid attention were adamant that Ava had groomed him. Prior to coming forward, Lava had the makings of a “perfect victim” in their eyes. He was cis, and five years under legal age during the interactions. He was victimized by a much older person who is now openly trans and at the time, acted in ways that were condemned across the whole political spectrum. Lava’s reluctance to consider himself a victim weakened this transphobic narrative, drawing the ire of the Twitter masses. The violation they saw suddenly became an admission to homosexuality, furthering their irrational anger.
Jess
Just a day after Lava’s statement, Jess, a trans woman going by the Twitter username Genderillenial (name displayed as Mooskina/Mooski), posted a thread detailing allegations of sexual assault against Ava. With screenshots of private conversations and selfies between the two across multiple messaging platforms, there was more than enough evidence to corroborate the inappropriate relationship—Ava used her superior position in the MrBeast company to take advantage of Jess sexually. However, despite the evidence becoming publicly available, Twitter users reversed course from Lava’s situation, using her trans identity to actively downplay her claims.
Unfortunately for Jess, her identity as a trans woman made it impossible for her to be a perfect victim—Twitter users were quick to write her off as an ontological evil and discounted her suffering in a situation that became far more physical than Lava’s. Even when Ava’s wrongdoings were acknowledged, Jess’ inability to quickly identify the power imbalance and disengage were used against her as a personal failing. Assuming they were even written by people, these vocal opinions conceal apathy and even disdain for Ava’s victims. They are an outcome of Twitter’s embrace of reactionary politics, specifically the belief that social deviants deserve to be harmed regardless of their innocence.
What happens in private
Having discussed the harm Twitter has done to victims during the recent YouTuber drama, I now want to touch on that harm in the context of Twitter’s functionality. If you took the time to read Jess’ thread, you may have noticed that instead of linking the first tweet of the actual thread, I linked the entire thread through a thread reader service before running it through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The first reason for this is the ability to set Twitter profiles to private. While private profiles have been around long before Elon Musk and benefit those who do not want a public presence, they can be detrimental when important information needs to be publicized. The Genderillenial account is public at the time I am writing this, but earlier on during the on-and-off process of working on this post (which I have admittedly stalled for far too long), Jess had gone private for some time due to harassment. Spurred by the toxicity of Musk-era Twitter, her privatization forced people to find other means of reading her thread. Her story missed out on significant exposure while it was relevant, and had she remained private, people could have interpreted it as a retraction of her allegations.
The second reason for my convoluted link to the thread comes from Twitter’s blatant loss of functionality under Elon Musk. I originally attempted to restore the thread by simply inputting the URL of its first tweet into Wayback Machine. However, while there were multiple captures of the tweet as expected from a high-profile allegation, none of them worked since Twitter functionalities for unregistered users were severely crippled under Musk’s direction. Unless you log in or use Nitter (how I collected screenshots for the tweets here), The URLs of tweets no longer display threaded tweets or replies beneath the main tweet. Furthermore, if Twitter even allows you to do it without a login wall, attempting to view an account shows only a small handful of tweets from the account in no particular order. As a result, captures taken during Jess’ account privatization displayed an error message while captures outside of it displayed only the first tweet, not nearly enough for people to believe her.
Twitter’s own collapse into privatization, from the privatization of the company to the tweets it hosts, undermines its niche as a public forum and denies sexual abuse victims a reliable opportunity to come forward. It is hard enough for victims to share their stories. Trapping those stories in a community increasingly dominated by right-wing trolls will only brand them with a scarlet letter.
