According to a Verge investigation, Twitter discussed developing an OnlyFans clone to monetize the adult content that has been widely available on the platform for many years. However, Twitter’s inability to efficiently identify and remove harmful sexual content put the brakes on that idea.
This spring, a committee that Twitter assembled to investigate the feasibility of such a move came to the conclusion that “Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale.”
According to Twitter spokesperson Katie Rosborough, the team’s conclusions were “part of a discussion, which ultimately led to us pausing the workstream for the correct reasons.”
Shortly after agreeing to a $44 billion sale to Elon Musk, Twitter is said to have stopped the Adult Content Monetization (ACM) project in May. However, the future of that deal is currently uncertain.
The senior team of the organisation came to the conclusion that it could not proceed with ACM without imposing additional health and safety precautions.
The report, which can be read in its entirety here, outlines Twitter researchers’ warnings that the firm was not doing enough to find and remove hazardous sexual content, such as Child Sexual Abuse Material, in February 2021. (CSAM).
According to reports, the researchers have told Twitter that RedPanda, its primary enforcement system, is “a legacy, unsupported programme” and “by far one of the most vulnerable, inefficient and under-supported tools” it utilises.
Even though the corporation has machine learning techniques, they reportedly have trouble spotting fresh CSAM in tweets and livestreams. Twitter manually notifies the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children of CSAM incidents (NCMEC).
The labor-intensive procedure, according to the researchers, caused a backlog of cases and a delay in notifying NCMEC about CSAM. According to Rosborough, Twitter has greatly upped its investment in CSAM detection and is hiring a number of professionals to address the problem since the researchers issued their paper last year.
According to Rosborough, Twitter “has zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation.” “We tenaciously combat child sex abuse online and have made major investments in technology and methods to execute our policy. Our committed employees strive to prevent harm to minors both online and offline by staying one step ahead of bad-faith actors.
Even if porn is widely available on the network, advertisers may have recoiled at the idea of adult content monetization, but Twitter’s potential financial benefits were obvious. This year, OnlyFans anticipates earning $2.5 billion in sales, which is roughly equal to what Twitter made in 2021.
Twitter provides producers with a number of opportunities to directly monetise the sizable followings that many of them have amassed there. The company and adult content producers could have benefited greatly from the addition of OnlyFans-style features. Despite the advances the corporation claims to have made over the past 18 months, larger issues have prevented it from taking that action.
