The Verge: Twitter Abandons Plans for Monetizing Adult Content

CHATSWORTH, Calif.—Social media giant Twitter was moving full-tilt toward launching an OnlyFans-esque service allowing adult content creators to monetize their wares on the platform, but pulled the plug on the idea last May, according a report published Tuesday by tech news site The Verge. The viability of the proposed offering was researched by an 84-person task force dubbed the "Red Team," The Verge learned from obtained documents and interviews with Twitter employees past and present. As virtually the lone mainstream site that allows sexually explicit material to be uploaded by users, which has in turn made it one of the prime advertising platforms for creators to drive traffic to OnlyFans and the like—thus in no small way helping OnlyFans in particular explode into the juggernaut it's become—Twitter saw a golden opportunity to "easily begin capturing a share of that money," The Verge's story said. "Twitter is so important to the porn world that fears the company will eventually cave to external pressures and shut it down have regularly occasionally roiled the world of adult creators," the story went on to note, pointing to a 2020 piece about a rumor that had circulated about just such an impending blockade. It should be made clear that the proposed monetization feature would have been a separate offering from the "Super Follow" option Twitter introduced one year ago, which allows users to charge for subscriptions to non-sexually explicit posts. What the Red Team concluded, The Verge reported, was that "Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale," and that "Today we cannot proactively identify violative content and have inconsistent adult content [policies] and enforcement. We have weak security capabilities to keep the products secure." Because of these concerns, as well as ones that drawing revenue from adult material could "alienate customers and attract significant scrutiny from Congress," the company halted the project indefinitely. Read The Verge's full story here. Photo By Howard Lake / Wikimedia Commons