Advertisers were outraged to learn that their ads were reportedly placed on the profile pages of Twitter accounts that contain requests for child porn or links to dark websites that exploit children.
New research from cybersecurity firm Ghost Data led Reuters to review the accounts and report on the egregious situation. Here’s what they found.
Advertisements for more than 30 companies appeared on these illicit profile pages, including Walt Disney Co, NBCUniversal, Coca-Cola Co, Dyson, Mazda, Forbes, and CBS Kids.
Some of the companies continued advertising on Twitter but removed their ads from certain sections of the site. Companies with greater integrity, or at least shrewder PR departments, suspended their ad campaigns altogether.
The Reuters review found that accounts with the keywords “rape” and “teens” appeared with tweets promoting corporate advertisers. For example, an ad for shoe company Cole Haan appeared next to a tweet by an account holder boasting their practice of “trading teen/child” content.
Cole Haan’s brand president David Maddocks told Reuters, “We’re horrified… Either Twitter is going to fix this, or we’ll fix it by any means we can, which includes not buying Twitter ads.”
Another Twitter account looking for “Yung girls ONLY, NO Boys” appeared with an ad for a children’s hospital in Texas – Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital.
“There is no place for this type of content online,” said a spokesperson for Mazda USA. The company removed its ads from all profile pages on Twitter.
“Twitter needs to fix this problem ASAP, and until they do, we are going to cease any further paid activity on Twitter,” said a spokesperson for Forbes.
Disney weighed in, too, saying that child porn content is “reprehensible.” A spokesperson for the company said they were “doubling-down on our efforts to ensure that the digital platforms on which we advertise, and the media buyers we use, strengthen their efforts to prevent such errors from recurring.”
Some might be thinking that Disney’s recent dedication to queer content makes this an interesting comeuppance in their case. After all, there is a significant push among deviants in the LGBTQIA+ “community” to normalize “minor-attracted people” (MAPs). But presumably, we are still a long way from the normalization of child pornography.
Twitter spokesperson Celeste Carswell issued a statement saying that the company “has zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation” and that they are planning to hire new officials to come up with policies and solutions. Now that this has been discovered, Twitter has a newfound interest in investigating it and preventing it in the future.
Carswell is right about one thing – they’re going to need outside help because Twitter doesn’t currently have the personnel or culture that is needed to monitor and eradicate this kind of activity.
@mariesweird follows an underage porn account. There are multiple other CP and zoophile accounts that they follow and as far as I am aware interact with.
They are absolutely disgusting. I recommend blocking and unfollowing them! pic.twitter.com/bkMHO3CmTr
— Emo (@Emo_not_found) September 22, 2022
💥They stole an entire election,they covered up Porn,Prostitutes,Crack Fueld Parties,Pedophila on Hunters lap top before the electon.Biden sold our reserves to Company in China Hunter had dealings with.He showered with his (underage)daughter..& What WE allow is what will continue
— Elena (@Sunshinelove68) September 25, 2022
This isn’t coming up just now, actually. Twitter is aware that further investigations have been ongoing. There was an exposé one month ago on The Verge, which reportedly hampered Twitter’s interest in producing a website that would compete with the quasi-pornographic OnlyFans.
Officially, the social media giant bans child exploitation. However, it appears to be home to a thriving presence of adult pornography, which accounts for about 13% of all content on Twitter, according to an internal company document seen by Reuters.
Ghost Data, which shared their findings exclusively with Reuters, found over 500 accounts that shared or requested child sexual abuse material over a 20-day period this month, 70% of which were not removed during the study period .
In fairness, Twitter has not been blind to the problem. And they recognize that these exploiters are crafty in their techniques at avoiding detection, such as the use of code words, such as “cp” for child pornography. As Twitter cracks down on one keyword, others emerge, which makes it “harder for (Twitter) to automate against,” according to internal documents.
Their transparency reports show that more than a million accounts were suspended last year for child sexual exploitation and that they made about 87,000 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a government-funded non-profit that facilitates information sharing with law enforcement, according to that organization’s annual report.
In a report from February 2021, a team of Twitter employees concluded that the company needed more investment to identify and remove child exploitation material. They further found that there was a backlog of cases to review for possible reporting to law enforcement.
The report included this statement: “While the amount of (child sexual exploitation content) has grown exponentially, Twitter’s investment in technologies to detect and manage the growth has not.”
This puts Twitter’s total devotion to the censoring of political viewpoints in its proper context. What kind of priorities lead a company to ban people who don’t believe in an experimental vaccine but fail to adequately deal with something so horrific as this? Not only were unknown numbers of exploitative accounts not banned by Twitter, but the company actually placed ads on the profile pages of these accounts. In the world we used to live in, this would be a scandal of such magnitude that it would completely ruin a company within two weeks.
It is starting to seem a little bit like Elon Musk was right – Twitter’s priorities and practices have led to sloppiness and dishonesty.
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