Twitter reportedly planned to monetize adult content on its platform this year, by allowing adult creators to sell subscriptions on the micro-blogging platform, and become profitable in a jiffy.
According to The Verge, Twitter was set to become a competitor to adult creator website OnlyFans by allowing adult creators to use its platform in the spring of 2022.
Some adult creators still reportedly rely on Twitter as a means to advertise their OnlyFans accounts, as posting porn doesn’t violate its guidelines.
However, an 84-employee “Red Team” discovered that Twitter cannot detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) at scale if it allows adult content to stream via its platform.
Twitter also lacked tools to verify that creators and consumers of adult content were above the age of 18.
The discovery by the Red Team actually derailed the project at Twitter.
“Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale,” the Red Team found.
As a result, in May, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced buying Twitter for $44 billion, the company delayed the project indefinitely, the report mentioned late on Tuesday.
“Allowing creators to begin putting their content behind a paywall would mean that even more, illegal material would make its way to Twitter — and more of it would slip out of view. Twitter had few effective tools available to find it,” the report noted.
Twitter’s yearly revenue is nearly $5 billion, a tiny amount compared to a company like Google, which earned $257 billion in revenue last year.
Google and Meta have more sophisticated technology to identify CSAM, and still, these systems are not full-proof.
“Twitter has zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation. We aggressively fight online child sexual abuse and have invested significantly in technology and tools to enforce our policy,” according to Twitter which is fighting a legal battle with Musk after he terminated the $44 billion takeover deal over the presence of bots.
