Advertisers Flee As Report Finds Twitter Fails To Remove More Than 70% Of Accounts Posting Child Porn
This is, sadly, not a surprise, and we just saw proof of Twitter’s refusal (or inability) to block child porn yesterday, when a gay porn star with over 142,000 followers posted a porn video featuring children that remained online for over 36 hours. And while that was an actual video that anyone could watch, the accounts detailed in this Reuters report were apparently looking to trade the illegal content with other users on Twitter. Such activity has advertisers rightly running for the hills, as the report found. Excerpt:
Some major advertisers including Dyson, Mazda, Forbes and PBS Kids have suspended their marketing campaigns or removed their ads from parts of Twitter because their promotions appeared alongside tweets soliciting child pornography, the companies told Reuters.
Brands ranging from Walt Disney Co, NBCUniversal and Coca-Cola Co to a children’s hospital were among more than 30 advertisers that appeared on the profile pages of Twitter accounts peddling links to the exploitative material, according to a Reuters review of accounts identified in new research about child sex abuse online from cybersecurity group Ghost Data.
Some of tweets include key words related to “rape” and “teens,” and appeared alongside promoted tweets from corporate advertisers, the Reuters review found. In one example, a promoted tweet for shoe and accessories brand Cole Haan appeared next to a tweet in which a user said they were “trading teen/child” content.
Ghost Data identified the more than 500 accounts that openly shared or requested child sexual abuse material over a 20-day period this month. Twitter failed to remove more than 70% of the accounts during the study period, according to the group, which shared the findings exclusively with Reuters.
After Reuters shared a sample of 20 accounts with Twitter last Thursday, the company removed about 300 additional accounts from the network, but more than 100 others still remained on the site the following day, according to Ghost Data and a Reuters review.
[Reuters: Exclusive-Brands blast Twitter for ads next to child pornography accounts]
A lot more details at the link.
I can’t see Twitter lasting much longer (especially if Republicans take control of Congress in November and begin efforts to have it shut down) given all the illegal and horrific things they help spread, including child porn, hate speech, terrorism, stalking, bomb threats, and more. They’ll need to try and save face and do a complete, 100% ban on all porn (just like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and most other social media sites have), or there won’t be a single brand left willing to advertise. That’s obviously unfair to all the adult performers who use the site to promote their adult content to other consenting adults, but as these things often go, sex workers are almost always the marginalized scapegoats who get left in the lurch. Either way, I give Twitter one more year, at the most.
