Twitter, porn and child abuse (The Critic Magazine)
Republished from The Critic.
Extract:
Twitter has a child sexual abuse material problem. Its executives are not only aware of the problem, but are obstinate in their refusal to properly tackle this growing crisis. A recent article in The Verge entitled “How Twitter’s Child Porn Problem Ruined Its Plans For An Onlyfans Competitor” has detailed exactly how Twitter has, in recent months, become more conscious than ever of the vastness of this problem on its platform.
As reported by The Verge, “According to interviews with current and former staffers, as well as 58 pages of internal documents obtained by The Verge, Twitter still has a problem with content that sexually exploits children. Executives are apparently well-informed about the issue, and the company is doing little to fix it.”
Problematic title aside — after all, the suggestion that “child porn” has somehow “ruined” Twitter’s opportunity to profit from the objectification and sexualisation of (predominantly) women is as grotesque as it is poor-in-taste — the article successfully highlights the fact that the platforming and facilitation of the euphemistically labelled “adult content” appears to be increasingly and intractably linked to child sexual abuse material.
(…)
Pulling the focus back to the basis of this article — the quashing of Twitter’s plan to set up its own stall in the marketplace of bodies — the recognition that child sexual abuse material appears wherever other sex industrialisation occurs should not be a surprise. The company’s own employees noted that “Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale”.
This is just a natural consequence of the floodgates opening. The fact that the porn industry has already far exceeded saturation point for almost every type of adult content, occurring simultaneously with the physical and psychological desire to seek out horrors that one decade ago might have been unimaginable, necessitates the influx and availability of those horrors. The two are inextricably linked.
Just as porn is inseparable from the bodies that engage in it, the marketplace has now become inseparable from the deluge of harrowing and nauseating content demanded of it. Twitter is right to put a stop to the monetisation of adult content, but to do so on the basis that child sexual abuse material is an unintended consequence misunderstands the issue. This is no longer a bug, but a feature of the porn industry at large.