Channel 4 Points Investigative Lens at Porn on Twitter

CYBERSPACE—Channel 4, the United Kingdom's PBS, has been looking into the amount of hardcore porn that is placed on Twitter. Specifically, its "investigation into the extent of the site's porn community" has concluded that "roughly one in every thousand tweets is a pornographic image."   In terms of sheer numbers, the network's technology producer, Geoff White, adds that "as many as 500,000 sexual images are posted daily, including images of hardcore and extreme sexual practices." He also notes, correctly, "The porn industry sees Twitter as one of the few remaining social media outlets for its products. Facebook and Instagram do not allow pornography, and neither does the video service Vine, which is owned by Twitter. Twitter bans users from having pornographic profile photos, but has no restrictions on the posting of such images." Putting a little more meat on the bones of his point he is building to, White adds, "Our analysis suggests roughly one in every thousand tweets is a pornographic image. There are more pictures of porn than there are of pets." So what exactly is the problem? White explains, "Twitter is also hugely popular among children. Of the UK's 15 million Twitter users, it's estimated more than a million are under 18. "Twitter has no controls to stop children seeing porn on the site," he elaborates. "Not only does it not ask for a user's age on sign-up, but it also allows any web user to look at content without signing in. This means that even if Twitter introduced age restrictions within the site, children would still be able to view pornography without logging in." Channel 4 also spoke to a few adult performers, including British star "Lexi Lowe, another porn model with a sizeable Twitter following," who told White, "You can have a warning which comes up every time you post a picture which says click if you want to see it. So it doesn't just come up on someone's screen. They have to click to see it. That's as censored as Twitter gets. I try to be clear on my bio that it's an 18-plus account." However, White adds that that "the warnings can be dismissed with a single click to reveal the image, and unlike Ms Lowe many people posting pornographic material do not bother marking their images as adults-only in the first place." White also spoke with Mark Hassel, a representative from Paul Raymond Publications, who mentioned the firm's 19+ Facebook filter, and added of its social media competitor, "I think Twitter should look at filtering and putting in an 18+ restriction. I think everyone in the adult industry would think that's the right thing. We have children and younger family members and don't want them seeing stuff that is too full-on and inappropriate." On the subject of filtering, White is even more critical of "the content filters put in place by many internet companies and backed by David Cameron," noting, "Only one company blocks Twitter (BT, for users of its 'moderate' level filter). None of the others filter out the site, nor its pornographic content. "Instead," he adds, "there is growing evidence that some parental control filters are blocking access to the very sites that aim to protect adults as well as young people from what in some cases can be the damaging effects of porn." He is referring to sexual addiction websites, which are sometimes inadvertently blocked "because the sites refer to sexual themes," but also reports, "The Open Rights Group has compiled details of thousands of sites that have been wrongly blocked." The types of sites reportedly being blocked are not exclusively adult-related, but include "everything from builders to girl guide groups," according to ORG's Executive Director, Jim Killock. Twitter did not directly address porn when contacted by White for comment, but he did report somewhat contradictorily, "Twitter declined to respond but did say such content represents as little as 0.1 per cent of daily content." In a separate blog item posted today, White follows up on the "Porn dilemma facing Twitter," describing the obvious mechanism that allows some frequent Twitter users to never experience porn compared with others who are awash in it. He explains, "So how come you’ve never seen any? Well, that’s how the web works. Internet companies track and gather data about you, then use it to target you with exactly the stuff you’ve expressed an interest in. If you follow musicians and artists on Twitter, for example, you’ll tend to see music and art on your feed. "During my research I’ve followed dozens of porn models on Twitter, so now my feed looks, well… NSFW, as the saying goes." More to the point, White ads of Twitter's so-called dilemma, "Should Twitter decide to do something about the porn on the site, they’ll face a challenge. Because they’ve never asked users to give their age on sign-up, if they now wanted to introduce age controls they’d have to go back to the entire Twitter user base and effectively ask them to re-register. "And even that wouldn’t fix the problem: you can look at Twitter without logging in, meaning age verification would be easy to bypass. "So Twitter would have two choices: force everyone to log in before viewing content, and introduce age verification. Or ban porn from the site altogether, meaning human moderators would have to look through as many as 25 million images a day. "Either option is costly, especially for a company that made a $125m net loss in the last quarter of last year." Which may be why Twitter may just do nothing about a problem that does appear to be resonating with Channel 4 viewers. As the one individual who bothered to comment on White's second story wrote, "The appeal of Twitter remains mysterious, at least to this Internet inhabitant. I wish I could care about the rights and wrongs of what may be posted there, but resounding apathy regarding the whole egocentric mess of it sadly makes that impossible."