While high-profile progressives and members of the activist media are still in meltdown mode over Elon Musk buying Twitter, the new CEO is working to address one of the platform’s most serious problems. For years, the platform has been fraught with content featuring the sexual abuse of children.
Advocates for victims of sex trafficking have been consistently demanding that the company do something to prevent abusers from disseminating child porn on the site but to no avail. Indeed, two minor plaintiffs sued Twitter for refusing to take down posts showing their abuse.
But now that the organization is under new management, this might change.
Tesmanian reported:
The problem of publishing pornographic content showing child sexual exploitation (CSE) on various Internet resources is deeply disturbing. While many platforms are fighting this by using tools that allow them to find and remove such content, Twitter, before it was bought by Elon Musk, did not put any real effort into this for years.
Eliza Bleu, an anti-human trafficking advocate, is one of several voices urging Twitter to address its child porn problem. “For ten years, the platform has not had a proper reporting form for content containing child sexual abuse material,” according to Tesmanian.
Bleu has been working behind the scenes with Musk and his team to reinstate a reporting system allowing users to alert the company to child porn being shared on the platform. The company added the feature in February this year but later took it down.
On November 19, she posted a tweet celebrating that three of the most popular hashtags used to sell child porn on the platform had been mostly cleaned out:
Wow! The most popular hashtag used to sell child sexual abuse material on Twitter is almost completely cleaned out.
Wow! The most popular hashtag used to sell child sexual abuse material on Twitter is almost completely cleaned out.
— Eliza (@elizableu) November 20, 2022
Bleu continued, explaining that the company “did add a direct reporting option for child sexual exploitation,” which was “not previously available and was a separate form that wasn’t easy to find.”
To those who aren’t aware yet, last week Twitter did add a direct reporting option for child sexual exploitation. (ONLY on tweets with content images/videos) this was not previously available and was a separate form that wasn’t easy to find.
I’m grateful to see these changes. pic.twitter.com/AI88XdX9HW
— Eliza (@elizableu) November 20, 2022
What is noteworthy about this story is that it only took Musk about three weeks after he took the helm at Twitter for him to begin addressing this problem. Yes, there will be more work to be done to protect victims of child porn, but it is clear that he is off to a good start.
But this raises an important – and disturbing – question: If Musk is able to decrease instances of child porn being shared on Twitter, why didn’t the previous leaders of the company do it?
Why does it take Musk buying the company for it to start taking actual steps to ensure that the abuse of children isn’t being promoted on the platform?
In April, I wrote about the second plaintiff who came forward to sue Twitter. Both of the victims had repeatedly tried to persuade the company to remove the videos depicting their abuse as children. But the company refused to take down the material, arguing that it did not violate its terms of service. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation Law Center said in the lawsuit:
Both plaintiffs were harmed by Twitter’s distribution of material depicting their sexual abuse and trafficking and by Twitter’s knowing refusal to remove the images of their sexual abuse (child pornography) when notified by John Doe #1 and his parents.
Removing blatant child abuse from the platform should have been a no-brainer, shouldn’t it? Facebook and other social media companies employed measures to curb the spread of child porn on their sites – what was the issue for Twitter?
What makes this situation even more infuriating is the fact that the company’s content moderators saw fit to ban people from using the term “groomer” when describing efforts to sexualize children and promote transgender among students. Apparently, brazen child abuse didn’t violate their terms and conditions, but the term “groomer” did.
Hopefully, this is only the beginning. Musk seems sincere about improving Twitter when it comes to free speech. But it is nice to see that he also takes the issue of child abuse seriously.
