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Nick Pickles, the head of global government affairs at X who defended Elon Musk’s decision in 2023 to reinstate a notorious account on the social media platform that shared child sexual abuse material, is leaving the company according to a tweet. Pickles says he made the decision to leave “several months ago” and didn’t explain where he may be heading next.
“After more than ten years, tomorrow will be my last day at X. It’s been an incredible journey,” Pickles wrote on Thursday. “The constant across my time at Twitter and X has been the amazing people I’ve worked with inside and outside the company. It’s been a privilege to lead the @globalaffairs team and I leave with more memories and lifelong friendships than I ever expected when I first walked into the London office back in 2014.”
The 40-year-old Pickles decided to stay with the company after Musk bought the platform in late 2022, a decision that many other executives did not choose, given the billionaire’s extreme right-wing politics and reputation for impulsive and idiotic moves. Many other executives were, of course, fired by Musk and are currently suing over unpaid severance contracts.
Formerly known as Twitter before Musk stripped out over a decade of brand equity by renaming it X, the company has lost enormous amounts of money for the bankers who helped him close the deal. Musk bought Twitter for about $45 billion and it’s worth roughly $19 billion today.
Pickles’ tenure as the head of global affairs was controversial, even before Musk bought the site. But it was his testimony in front of an Australian parliamentary hearing about online content moderation on August 9, 2023 that was genuinely shocking. The Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement heard from a number of big tech companies like Google and Facebook. Twitter’s responses to various questions about online safety were the most perplexing.
Strangely, the testimony given by Pickles didn’t get much attention in the U.S., likely because it was in front of an Australian government committee and American audiences often shy away from international news. But it made quite a splash in Australia, raising lots of questions about what exactly social media platforms were doing to police the worst of the worst content online. Australian government websites no longer have a copy of the testimony that was livestreamed last year, but Gizmodo has clips that we’ve uploaded to YouTube to give you a sense of just how surreal the testimony was from Pickles.
Pickles tried to explain why sharing child sexual abuse material on X wasn’t an automatic ban from the platform. Incredibly, Pickles tried to say that people might be sharing the content “out of outrage” or to “raise awareness,” both very strange answers.
“Accounts dedicated to distributing, accounts engaging in this, we want off Twitter, off X as fast as possible. But there are cases globally where people do share this content out of outrage. And in those cases, we do look at whether removing the content is the appropriate response,” Pickles said at the August 2023 hearing.
But Australian senators clearly weren’t having it.
“Well, I’m sorry, but if I’m outraged by some content, I’m not going to share that to make the point,” Australian Senator Helen Polley told Pickles during the hearing. “But what I would do is, if I am a consumer of that type of material, you’re now just saying, if I just share that in the pretense that I’m outraged, that’s okay.”
Polley pointed out that Australia had laws against allowing people to share child abuse images online, just as every other country does.
“Well, it’s actually a crime. It’s a crime, and it should be suspended permanently,” Polley continued. “There is no excuse whether you’re posting something through outrage, which to me is not logical, that your account should not be permanently suspended.”
Musk’s widespread layoffs after taking control of the site in October 2022 reportedly dumped about 75% of the staff, hitting the Child Safety Team particularly hard, according to news outlets at the time. And the conversation turned to a then-recent instance when a right-wing influencer shared a watermarked image of child sexual abuse. The abuse material was apparently one of the worst images ever created, and showed a child being tortured, according to the Washington Post.
Australian Senator David Shoebridge pointed out that Musk personally intervened to reinstate the account that had shared the heinous image.
“When it was pointed out that this account, which had more than half a million followers, had tweeted an image containing child sexual abuse material—some of the most notorious and appalling child sexual abuse material—your boss, tweeted that the account had been suspended, the material had been deleted, but then after pressure from his followers, your boss Elon Musk, reinstated the account,” Shoebridge said.
Oddly enough, Pickles tried to defend the X policies that allowed the right-wing influencer to say on the platform, which remains the case to this day. And he said that some accounts may only be banned after sharing more than one offending image. The Australian senator clearly couldn’t believe what she was hearing, asking Pickles if he really said that accounts may only be banned after repeatedly sharing child sexual abuse images.
Anyone who’s ever tried to start a social media platform will tell you that content moderation is hard. Bluesky, a relatively new site that recently emerged as a Twitter alternative, is dealing with the same challenges as everyone else as the site has grown enormously in the past week. Musk’s idiotic decisions in Brazil got X banned in that country, and Bluesky saw an explosion of new sign-ups as a result, with growth of 50% over the past week alone. But leaders at Bluesky have been talking this week about the growing pains.
“CSAM content has risen 10x week-over-week,” Aaron Roderick, the head of Trust and Safety at Bluesky, wrote on Thursday. “While we detect confirmed cases quickly, manual review is still necessary for NCMEC reports. This increase impacts our mods, who are repeatedly exposed to such content.”
But X really does seem to be in a class of its own. The site has increasingly become a haven for right-wing extremists and a safe space for Musk as he descends further into the worship of guys like Donald Trump. Musk’s version of X may be losing tremendous amounts of money, but it exists as a very enjoyable online clubhouse where everyone tells him just how smart and savvy he is. And that goes a long way for any insecure billionaire with more money than sense.
X didn’t immediately respond to questions emailed Friday regarding whether the company stands by all the testimony Pickles gave in Australia last year. Gizmodo will update this post if we hear back.
