You’ve probably already noticed but, unlike other platformsin Twitter The publication of pornographic content is allowed. This past spring, the company wanted to go further and studied the possibility of monetizing sexual videos, a radical change that did not prosper due to the difficulties in accurately detecting and blocking the sexual exploitation childish or the naked not consented, as reported by the US portal The Verge.
The proposal that Twitter then put on the table was to allow the creators of adult content sell paid subscriptions to users who want to have access to their privacy, the same model that has catapulted the platform OnlyFans. Twitter would have kept a part of those subscriptions. Company executives said that by adopting this measure, they would risk losing the support of many advertisers, their main business, but that the new business porno would have allowed them to offset those potential losses.
Before making such a drastic decision, Twitter created 84 employees who would study in detail the viability of the proposal. Last April, the so-called ‘Red Team’ concluded that the platform’s lack of ability to effectively monitor harmful content made it impossible to create a subscription model for pornographic content like OnlyFans. “Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale,” they noted last April in an internal document seen by The Verge.
sexual exploitation of minors
The team noted that Twitter lacked tools to prevent the proliferation of illicit content about minors — something that is already happening today — or to detect the real age of creators of sexual content. Jumping into the porn business would accentuate that problem, they concluded. Those warnings about security of children is what derailed the project, which was put on hold indefinitely in May, shortly after Twitter’s board and tech tycoon Elon Musk agreed to their purchase of the red social for 44,000 million dollars (about 41,000 million euros).
Still, Twitter continues to have a major problem with the sexual exploitation of minors. The Verge’s investigation indicates that the platform’s directive “is doing little to fix it” despite the warnings of its employees, who have been asking their bosses for years to improve the tools for detecting child pornography.
With 229 million users a day, Twitter is one of the most used social networks on the planet. However, the platform has failed to turn a profit in eight of the last ten years. That unstable business model has caused Twitter to spend less on content moderation than competitors like Facebook. Several employees have pointed out to The Verge that the company works with technologies that are “fragile and inefficient”, which leads it to not detect a “considerable amount” of illegal content.
“Today we can’t proactively identify violent content and we have [políticas] of inconsistent adult content and its enforcement,” wrote the ‘Red Team‘ in your internal report. “We have weak security capabilities to keep products safe.”