Hashtags Promoting Child Sex Abuse Material On Twitter Blocked Following Investigative Report

After an investigation, Twitter blocked hashtags and keywords that promoted the sale of child sex material (CSAM).

Original source: NBC News reported Individuals using Twitter to sell or trade CSAM had used multiple hashtags related to Mega, a file-sharing site. According to the outlet, dozens of people published hundreds of tweets about the hashtags each day.

Ella Irwin, Twitter’s vice president of product trust and safety, told the outlet on Friday in an email after the report was published that the platform would conduct a “specific additional review” Investigate over the weekend.

“As you probably know the links you shared relate to a file sharing service broadly used for a wide variety of purposes and so that makes it much harder to find the specific illegal content being posted using the hashtags in question,” Irwin explained to the outlet.

Irwin informed the outlet that her team met the following day and decided to ban the hashtags. The hashtags were already being reviewed by the company.

“We were already reviewing doing this in the coming weeks, given that we have banned other hashtags used commonly for trafficking [CSAM] material already, however we made the decision to accelerate this action for these terms,” She spoke.

Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter has claimed that Twitter was confronted with a multitude of issues related to child sexual abuse material in the past.

Such issues Inclusion There were more than 500 accounts that solicited such material. This led 30 advertisers to pull their ads services from their Twitter accounts or pause them.

A cyber-security data analyst independent of the government identified 95% active accounts that were exploiting CSAM. These accounts allegedly contained videos of teenagers and children engaging in sexual activities.

Irwin openly spoke about the possibility of partnering with organizations around the world to combat illegal content, trafficking and to identify material they would have had to wait longer to access via the platform.

“We can do a lot with the information we’re given by organizations,” Last month, she spoke out in support of a Twitter space. “We can go out and then do massive investigations and take down a lot of things,” adding it’s “much more effective when that communication channel is there.”

Irwin said that Musk has pushed for the inclusion of organizations focused on abuse issues in order to improve the platform.

Irwin explained to NBC that her team was analyzing thousands hashtags in preparation for a project due for completion soon, but she made an exception to ban hashtags promoting such material.

“If bad actors are successfully evading our detection using these specific terms and in spite of our detection mechanisms currently in place, then we would rather bias towards making it much harder to do this on our platform,” Irwin wrote.

Mega’s Executive Chairman Stephen Hall told NBC News in an email on Friday — before Twitter’s trust and safety team blocked such hashtags — that the New Zealand-based encrypted service had a zero-tolerance policy toward CSAM.

“If a public link is reported as containing CSAM, we immediately disable the link, permanently close the user’s account, and provide full details to the New Zealand authorities, and any relevant international authority,” Hall stated.

Hall responded to Irwin’s block of Mega-related terms in Twitter via an e-mail. “a rather blunt reaction to a complex situation.”

Twitter’s CSAM problem has been Documented More than a decade.

Twitter claimed that they fight online child sexual abuse. But, a Twitter Red Team report compiled by an Adult Content Monetization team found that, although Twitter invested in technology to detect and manage the issue. “growth has not.”

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which is responsible for assisting Internet sites like Twitter in removing such material, reported last year that 86,666 CSAM reporting on Twitter had been made to them. The center receives the report once CSAM has been detected and is removed. This informs law enforcement about further actions.

Musk stated last year that the social media platform would address its child sexual exploitation issue as its number one priority.

Securities and Exchange Commission documents and internal records obtained by the NBC News report shows the platforms’s trust and safety has less than half the number of employees working the department than did at the end of 2021.

Irwin claimed last month, when she joined Twitter before Musk acquired it, that she was “shocked to find that there were such gaping holes in some of these really critical areas like, for example, child safety.”

However, Bloomberg Reports indicate that the safety and trust team were subject to further cuts.

Twitter watchdogs have called on Elon Musk to ban pornography on the platform until it can implement an age and consent verification system for those depicted in the images and videos amid alarming concerns over the internet’s child sexual exploitation epidemic.

Officials from National Center on Sexual Exploitation Telled The Daily Wire