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February 7, 2023On January 24, 2023, members of the Science and Security board pulled a black hood off the doomsday clock to reveal that humanity, according to them, was ninety seconds closer to midnight, or, in their own words, the closest to nuclear annihilation we’ve ever been. The spectacle looked something like ISIS recording themselves about to hack off the head of a hostage. There’s been a lot of talk of doom and war and the culture incinerating itself. I don’t think that’s unique to modernity. But the Internet certainly exasperates it. We have always been wired to both fear and fetishize our own destruction.
I was thinking about all this doom when Eliza Bleu called me on the same day those scientists pushed the hands on their symbolic clock closer to “midnight.” She had been trending on Twitter. Eliza and the doomsday clock don’t really have anything to do with each other, but they were symbolically connected in my mind. The end of the world is always upon us. These days it can feel like our own personal destruction is the end of the world—and other days the end of the world is some distant thought that has nothing to do with us. But at that moment, as she was trending on Twitter for accusations of lying about being trafficked and censoring critics with the help of Elon Musk—it kind of felt like this was a personal doomsday scenario for Eliza.
In the past few months, I’ve had this strange opportunity to speak with people at the exact moment when they were trending on Twitter—and they were never trending for anything totally positive. Trends typically bring about waves of hate and posturing and ruthless criticism—this can have a positive or negative effect depending on the target. Whether I was talking to Ye (Kanye West) or Kari Lake or Eliza Bleu, it was surprising to me that despite the doom attached to their names, especially in the digital space, each of them remained oddly hopeful. I couldn’t tell if that was part faith or part of trying to convince themselves everything was OK or a bit of both.
Bleu gained notoriety over the last three years as a public advocate for survivors of human trafficking. She has also said that she is a survivor of trafficking herself—and has been the subject of many articles, as well as a guest on a number of podcasts where she has discussed, in part, her survival story and what she believes needs to be done to help those who might also be trafficked.
Her profile exploded when Eliza and Elon Musk did a Twitter Spaces. According to her, that was the first time Elon spoke to her directly. She had also emailed him solutions for the platform that she told me she offered for no charge. She says that Elon also didn’t ask for the solutions, she just sent them. Before they interacted over her tweet about Yoel Roth, Elon had liked some of her tweets.
Before her story was put into question, Bleu seemed like one of the rare people on Twitter around whom various political factions could rally. It was hard to argue against what she was most vocal about—saving people from the perils of human trafficking, removing child pornography from Twitter, and seeking to work with big tech to eliminate the ways in which traffickers exploit victims through the internet. It was an easy and righteous cause to support. One of her most popular tweets, which was pinned to her profile, showcased the maddening nightmare of a person who couldn’t get Twitter to take down underage pornographic images that circulated the platform.
