Something other than the whole Elon Musk takeover saga and more recent revelations that the company has been deliberately working to mislead investors and the market, on various fronts. Today, another story raises even more questions about Twitter management – and what’s seemingly going down at Twitter HQ.

As The Verge reports:

“In the spring of 2022, Twitter considered making a radical change to the platform. After years of quietly allowing adult content on the service, the company would monetize it. The proposal: give adult content creators the ability to begin selling OnlyFans-style paid subscriptions, with Twitter keeping a share of the revenue.”

Twitter NSFW

Porn Twitter would certainly be an extreme 180, and the associated risks of not only acknowledging the presence of such, but to also encourage it, would be far-reaching, potentially alienating advertisers who would fear being associated with more controversial material, inviting more scrutiny from US regulators.

Specifically, The Red Team found that Twitter ‘cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale’, which is a problem that persists to this day. Apparently, Twitter repeatedly falls short of agreed standards and processes to detect and remove such.

The investigation found out that as Twitter grew, its investment in detecting sensitive material as mentioned above has not increased in step, with the company instead prioritizing growth in other fields except this, which is simply bad practice. These revelations are another startling insight into the current state of Twitter, which may or may not be riddled with bots and already hosts so much porn content that a search for virtually any term in the app will eventually uncover some shocking video clip in-stream.

In itself, this should be enough to have the app come under increasing regulatory scrutiny, while The Verge also notes that Twitter has actually become a rising interest for adult performers in recent years, due to Tumblr’s decision to ban adult content in 2018. That means Twitter is now one of the only mainstream platforms that allow users to upload sexually explicit photos and videos, hence its growing prevalence as a promotional tool for the adult industry.

Amid this, Twitter’s capacity to detect and remove harmful sexual content has been in steady decline. This seems like a disaster waiting to happen, with Twitter potentially one court case away from major penalties. On the topic of the Musk drama, these new claims relating to Twitter’s failure to detect and remove harmful sexual content could have Elon, if he does become the new Twitter Chief, could be forced to pay out a raft of penalties among his initial actions, significantly impacting the platform’s capacity to align with his ‘ideal’ Twitter vision.

The Wrap

The major concern here is that Twitter is failing to protect vulnerable people through its inability to police harmful adult content to the point that it couldn’t even see a viable way to fix it. That’s a major concern and should be one of the more premier points that regulators should be pushing for, which would likely have Twitter execs grilled to the point of charring about these latest revelations. What would this mean for the app’s future? Twitter-Hub? Twitter needs to really pick up the slack on this one.

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Sources 

https://bit.ly/3Rl1d2Y