Twitter’s former head of safety posed as a child in sting operations to help catch potential pedophiles before joining the company

• Del Harvey helped catch potential pedophiles before she became the head of Twitter’s trust and safety team, Wired reported.
• She left Twitter in 2021. Before that, she worked at a nonprofit that ran online sting operations to catch possible predators.
• Harvey posed as a child online and even partnered with NBC’s show “To Catch a Predator.”

Before she became the head of Twitter’s trust and safety team, Del Harvey spent her time catching online predators, Wired reported.

Wired published the lengthy interview between Harvey and senior writer Lauren Goode on Tuesday.

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 before that, Harvey worked for the nonprofit group Perverted Justice, which specialized in posing as children online to try to catch potential pedophiles.

Wired reported that Harvey started working at Perverted Justice in 2003, when she was 21 years old. Because of her smaller frame, Harvey could also pass for a child, the report said, so she would sometimes pose as a young boy or girl to assist in the sting operations.

Harvey later worked in television, Wired reported, when Perverted Justice partnered with NBC’s Dateline for the show “To Catch a Predator,” which centered around catching potential sex offenders via internet sting operations.

The report also noted that Harvey’s real name isn’t Del Harvey; it’s an alias she adopted to protect her identity from the predators she helped expose.

Harvey started working for Twitter in 2008 and stayed at the company for more than a decade. She told Wired that being the head of Twitter’s trust and safety team meant making tough decisions, sometimes with very little time.

“You have to live with making the least bad decision you can with the resources you have,” she told the publication.

Since Harvey left and Musk bought the website, the trust and safety team has been gutted. The former safety boss called Musk’s moves to fire much of the team “baffling,” but wouldn’t say that Twitter was completely “dead.”

“Dead in what way?” she told Goode. “There’s a very active right-wing Nazi group, some very active groups on there. I think it is dead in certain ways for certain things. And then for other people, it’s exactly what they want.”