On Saturday, a cyber security and data analyst helping finance an investigation into Twitter’s purported problem with child sexual abuse material (CSAM) said that the company had nearly quadrupled its daily suspension rate on accounts that distribute exploitative content involving child pornography.
At the beginning of the year, Andrea Stoppa, creator of the cybersecurity firm Ghost Data, launched her investigation into the issue after hearing a warning about its seriousness. More than 500 accounts reportedly soliciting child sex abuse content appeared alongside or on profile pages of at least 30 big marketers’ Twitter accounts, prompting some of those businesses to suspend or terminate their ad services on the social media network.
When Stroppa first analyzed the problem in September of last year, Twitter suspended about half as many accounts per day for promoting CSAM as they do today. Since then, the social media platform has updated a mechanism to detect historical and contemporary content related to CSAM at a much “faster, more efficient, and more aggressive” speed.
When asked about Twitter’s policy about “illicit” content, Stroppa said, “No pity for people who are participating in these unlawful activities,” adding that Twitter will find such content regardless of when it was uploaded.
There is evidence that sexually abusive content, including child pornography, has been shared on Twitter for at least ten years. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 86,666 CSAM reports in 2018.
Elon Musk inherited two large cases in October involving two underage survivors who claimed to have been exploited on the site when he bought it. In one example, the tweet received over 2,000 shares and 160,000 views, and the minor survivor begged Twitter to take it down since she was on the verge of suicide.
After intervention from DHS, the survivor’s sexual abuse content was taken down.
Stroppa stated that within a 24-hour period, the platform increased its efforts to crack down on “suspicious accounts,” resulting in the removal of 44,000 handles and 1,300 profiles that employed stealthy communication techniques like codewords and text hidden within images in order to evade detection. Many of these accounts originated from networks with Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking users who share content depicting child sexual exploitation.
Stroppa remarked, “Zero tolerance,” and said that Twitter had enlisted outside specialists to bolster its safeguards for kids.
When Eliza Bleu joined Twitter in early 2019, she immediately began speaking out against the platform’s child pornography epidemic.
Bleu said she was “floored” after reading the newest data on the number of deleted profiles.
Until recently, “I don’t believe I thought any of these things was doable at the extent that they’re eliminating it now,” Bleu said. “They’ll simply have to stay at it, keep inventing, and keep making it a high priority,” we said.
She said, “I feel like I’m watching a miracle.”
On Saturday, Bleu took the virtual stage at a Twitter Space on the site, where Musk spent hours addressing questions from renowned users to discuss her work in the fight for justice for victims of child sex trafficking.
She said that Twitter “always prioritized money above the lives of minor survivors.”
Bleu emphasized how much more severely Stroppa and the reorganized Trust and Safety team had cracked down on the content compared to when Twitter was in charge.
Prior to Musk’s takeover, the site had been shown to delete as many as 57,000 user profiles in a single month. Today, that number sits at around 44,000.
Musk expressed his gratitude to Bleu and Stroppa in the Twitter thread, and Bleu told The Daily Wire that she was “grateful to be recognized” for her years of work advocating for survivors.
Musk stated on Saturday that he believed a “very nice instance of crowdsourcing” had occurred when users of Twitter contributed to an effort to end child exploitation. It’s true, yeah; in the last month, Twitter has done more to prevent child exploitation than the government has in the last decade.
“That’s absurd,” Musk chimed in. To be honest, it amazes me, and we’re going to keep doing it because it’s always going to be at the top. Kids have no way of protecting themselves. Thus it falls on adults to do it.