- According to Wired, Del Harvey helped catch potential pedophiles before becoming head of Twitter’s trust and safety team.
- She left Twitter in 2021. She previously worked at a nonprofit that ran online operations to catch potential predators.
- Harvey posed as a child online and even collaborated with NBC’s “To Catch a Predator.”
Before she led Twitter’s trust and safety team, Del Harvey spent her time catching online predators, Reported by wire.
On Tuesday, Wired published an extensive interview between Harvey and senior writer Lauren Goode.
Harvey made content moderation decisions at Twitter (now called X since Elon Musk bought the platform) for 13 years before leaving the company in 2021.
But previously Harvey worked for the nonprofit Perverted Justice, which specialized in posing as children online to catch potential pedophiles.
Wired reported that Harvey started working at Perverted Justice in 2003, when she was 21 years old. The report states that due to Harvey’s smaller frame, she could also pass for a child, so she sometimes pretended to be a boy or girl to help with sting operations.
As Wired reports, Harvey later worked in television when Perverted Justice partnered with NBC’s Dateline on “To Catch a Predator,” a show whose main goal was to catch potential sex offenders through online scams.
The report also noted that Harvey’s real name is not Del Harvey; is a pseudonym she adopted to protect her identity from the predators she helped expose.
Harvey started at Twitter in 2008 and remained with the company for over a decade. She told Wired that being the head of Twitter’s trust and safety team means making difficult decisions, sometimes at very short notice.
“You have to live by making the least bad decision you can with the resources you have,” she told the publication.
Since Harvey left and Musk bought the site, the trust and safety team has been broken up. The former security chief called Musk’s actions in firing most of his team members “surprising,” but stopped short of saying Twitter was completely “dead.”
– Dead in what sense? she told Goode. “There is a very active right-wing Nazi group, there are some very active groups there. I think it’s dead in some ways. And for other people, it’s exactly what they want.”
