Elon Musk said in November that Twitter’s top priority is to remove content that sexually exploits children. But Twitter didn’t appear to have taken any action against a number of hashtags and keywords used to promote the sale of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) until NBC News identified the problem in a Report released on Friday.
Twitter blocked searches for the hashtags and keywords on Saturday, NBC News wrote yesterday.
“NBC News found that a number of hashtags on the platform related to file-sharing service Mega served as rallying points for users looking to trade or sell CSAM. NBC News monitored the hashtags over a period of several weeks and counted dozens of users collectively posting hundreds of tweets each day,” the report said. “The accounts used thinly obfuscated keywords and CSAM-related terms to identify the content to advertise which they said was stored on Mega and which they said was available for purchase or trade.”
Some accounts had been using the CSAM hashtags for months, and “Dozens of users had tagged Musk with the hashtags to alert him to the issue,” NBC News wrote.
“Almost all tweets viewed by NBC News that promoted or promoted CSAM used hashtags related to Mega or another similar service, allowing users to search and find their tweets. Although the hashtags have been active for months, they remain searchable on the platform. ‘” said Friday’s report.
Twitter laid off half of its employees after Musk bought the company, then lost more employees after Musk issued an ultimatum saying employees had to commit to “working long hours at high intensity” to to keep their jobs. Downsizing has reportedly left the team responsible for reviewing and escalating reports on CSAM with “an overwhelmed emergency crew”.
Twitter VP discusses hashtag bans
Following Friday’s report, Ella Irwin, Twitter’s vice president of product trust and safety, told NBC News that the department would review the content over the weekend. “As you probably know, the links you shared are to a file-sharing service that is widely used for a variety of purposes, and that makes it much harder to find the specific illegal content posted with the hashtags in question ‘ Irwin wrote in an email.
On Saturday, Irwin sent a follow-up email to NBC News, reporting that Twitter had banned the hashtags. “We have already been looking into this over the coming weeks as we have banned other hashtags commonly used for commerce [CSAM] Material already, but we have made the decision to expedite this action for these conditions,” she wrote.
NBC News paraphrased Irwin by saying, “Twitter has analyzed thousands of hashtags over the past six weeks for a project that should be completed in the next few weeks. She noted that the company didn’t want to ban hashtags that had legitimate uses, but in this case the company decided to take action.”
Irwin also wrote, “We definitely know we still have work to do in this area, and certainly believe we’ve improved rapidly and realized far more than Twitter has realized in a long time, but we’re putting a number of things to work.” to keep improving.”
Despite extensive staff cuts, Irwin told NBC News that Twitter “now has about 25% more staff on this issue/area than the company had at its peak last January.”
Mega Executive Chairman Stephen Hall told NBC News last week that if a public link is reported to contain CSAM, we will immediately disable the link, permanently close the user’s account and provide full details to the New Zealand authorities and any relevant international authorities. An NBC News email said yesterday: “Hall responded to the news that the mega-terms were blocked on Twitter by writing that it was ‘a rather blunt response to a complex situation.'”
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