Children see hardcore porn on Twitter while looking for celebrities
Children are being exposed to hardcore pornography on Twitter as they innocently search for pop stars and celebrities.
Unsolicited footage depicting graphic sex acts frequently appears on the social networking site’s results section. in most cases, the videos play automatically when users search for names including Kate Middleton, Beyonce and Kate Winslet.
even searches for political events, such as Prime Minister’s Questions, can result in unwanted porn flooding the feed.
Most are posted by porn stars trying to drum up custom for their paid-for websites and webcam sex pages. The explicit clips appear even when the Twitter account has been set to a safe mode where ‘sensitive content’ is supposed to be hidden.
Twitter, believed to have around a million child users in Britain, does not ask for a date of birth when users create an account and has no minimum age.
The site allows the porn stars to use the networking site, but on the condition they do not feature explicit material in their profile pictures. however, they frequently post rolling videos of hardcore sex scenes with unrelated mentions of hollywood stars or celebrities so they automatically appear in popular searches.
Twitter gives users an option to edit their settings so they receive warnings about tweets that con- tain ‘material that may be sensitive’. But even with these settings turned on pornographic content is often automatically displayed.
A search for Kate Middleton, using full safety settings, produced a video of a nude woman pole-dancing to advertise a porn site. in a search for Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet, half of all tweets displayed in the results contained hardcore porn videos that began playing automatically.
Similar results followed searches for singer Beyonce and actresses Claire Foy, Claire danes and helen Mirren. A search for live reaction to PMQs this week brought not just tweets from political commentators and MPs but also explicit images of young women and graphic sex descriptions.
Twitter allows any internet user to look at content on the site without signing in.
This means even if the site did introduce age restrictions, children would still be able to view pornography posted on Twitter accounts without logging in. Twitter stressed the porn videos were posted by ‘rogue accounts’ looking to circumnavigate its rules, and said it takes action as quickly as possible to remove them.
it said it has tools in place to detect spam but also relies on users reporting offending accounts or tweets.
new accounts automatically play videos that appear in results feeds, but this can be disabled by changing the settings. The revelations come as Twitter boasted how it gained nine million new users in the past three months.
The site reported monthly active users had risen to 328 million, up from 319 million in the last quarter, and a 6 per cent increase on this time last year.
The platform’s recently established live video streaming service also reported 31 per cent more interaction this quarter, with 45 million unique views across more than 800 hours of live video.
however, the company’s revenue plunged 8 per cent from £464million to £427million during the same period.