Elon Musk’s porn problem (The Critic Magazine)
Republished from The Critic.
Extract:
On 1 November, the Washington Post reported that Twitter — under the new stewardship of Elon Musk — was circulating an internal email describing the imminent implementation of “Paywalled Video”. On a mock-up of the feature seen by the Washington Post, it was described as:
Mock-ups of the feature viewed by The Post show a tweet with four images. Three are immediately viewable, whilst the fourth is obscured, with a lock icon and the message “view for $1.” Paying that amount would unlock the video, with the creator receiving money via Stripe whilst Twitter takes an unspecified amount. Users who haven’t paid would not be able to see the video but could like or retweet the tweet.
If this feature is rolled out as described, it is likely that it would apply to various different “types” of content. Most notably, there is already an acute awareness that this could potentially be a boon for “adult content creators”, in the same vein as websites such as OnlyFans. This, to put it bluntly, would risk opening the floodgates to a deluge of monetised illegal and nightmarish content, including child sexual abuse and other forms of sexual violence such as rape and sexual assaults.
The links between the monetisation of pornography and a consequent surge in illegal, sexually violent and abusive photos and videos was highlighted only two months ago in this very publication. Earlier this year a leaked memo revealed that Twitter was already planning to introduce paywalled content, geared towards creating a new revenue stream from adult content creators.
It is not a tech problem. It is a porn problem
However, Twitter’s own investigation found: “Allowing creators to begin putting their content behind a paywall would mean that even more illegal material would make its way to Twitter — and more of it would slip out of view. Twitter had few effective tools available to find it.”
The question must be posed to Musk et al: what does he think has changed in the ensuing period of time that would mean this would no longer be a risk? The previous article covering this issue goes in-depth as to how the porn industry fundamentally drives a proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but it would behove Musk and whomever is ultimately hired to oversee Twitter’s overhauled functionality to get to grips with understanding why this is such a problem.
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