The porn dilemma facing Twitter

“Porn on Twitter?! I’ve never seen any.”

It’s a response I’ve heard repeatedly while researching the site’s thriving pornography scene. Because Twitter has no restrictions on porn (despite having around a million child users in the UK), it’s become a vital tool for models, performers and publishers to show their work, attract fans, and push traffic to money-making services such as webcam sex sites.

Our analysis suggests one in every thousand tweets contains a pornographic image: some of them explicit depictions of hardcore practices.

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.

No login needed

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.

Follow @geoffwhite247 on Twitter