Whereas Twitter now has thousands of fewer employees, fears are being raised about the platform’s ability to fight against the dissemination of child pornography content.
Last week, Elon Musk assured in a tweet that “ the elimination of the exploitation of children is priority n°1 from the social network. But what if no one is there to detect it?
A single person for the entire Asia Pacific region
Indeed, once arrived at the head of Twitter, the billionaire decided to lay off more than half of the staff, and hundreds of other employees resigned. As a result, staff in key divisions like moderation and ethics were simply gutted. This is particularly the case of a team responsible for removing child pornography content on Twitter in the Asia Pacific region, which represents a huge market of 4.3 billion people, or nearly 60% of the world’s population.
According to the media Wired, there is only one person left to support the removal of child pornography content in this area. The social network’s employees do not fight child abuse alone, they are indeed accompanied by NGOs who spot them and send them to Twitter for automatic deletion. However, in-house workers are key to analyzing the metadata, which helps the people writing the detection code identify child pornography networks before the content is shared.
“ It’s a delusion to think there won’t be an impact on the platform if the people who worked on child safety within Twitter can be fired or allowed to quit. “says Carolina Christofoletti, researcher on child pornography content at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
Twitter tools are not effective enough
The work of employees is all the more complex as the social network accepts the sharing of consented pornography. The tools for differentiating prohibited content from authorized content are not yet effective enough, hence the importance of human intervention.
The presence of child pornography content on Twitter is a problem that predates the arrival of Elon Musk. In September, for example, brands Dyson and Forbes suspended advertising campaigns after their ads appeared alongside child abuse content.
Between July and December 2021, Twitter suspended more than 500,000 accounts related to child pornography, a 31% increase from the previous six months.
Source : Wired
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