Twitter was forced to cancel plans to enter the pornography industry after an internal report cautioned that child pornography and sexual exploitation would explode if Twitter monetized pornographic content, The Verge reported Tuesday.
Twitter was hoping to take advantage of its position as the primary marketing platform for pornographic material on the adult website OnlyFans, with content creators often advertising their OnlyFans content on Twitter, The Verge reported.
The report by Twitter’s Red Team, who evaluated the possibility of Twitter successfully monetizing pornographic content, found that Twitter lacked the technological capability to police an ongoing crisis of exploitative sexual content on its platform.
OnlyFans, a recent juggernaut in the sex industry, is projected to earn $2.5 billion in revenue this year off the back of its subscription and tipping model that allows users to give money directly to pornographic creators directly, according to Axios.
OnlyFans has struggled to find investors — despite the fact its 2022 projections represent over $2.1 billion in growth in just two years — with many turned off by its pornographic content, or by its reputation for pornographic material that may scare off other business partners.
Twitter had been looking for ways to make money outside of its traditional advertising revenue after struggling to turn a profit in only two of the last 10 years, launching projects like “Super Follows” which allow content creators to sell non-sexual content directly to customers, with Twitter taking a cut of the revenue, The Verge reported.
However, after popular forum Tumblr banned adult content, users began to use Twitter to post pornographic and otherwise sexually explicit content, roughly at the same time as OnlyFans creators began using the site to post advertisements for paywalled content on the other site.
The company figured it was only a small step towards an OnlyFans-like system similar to “Super Follows,” allowing Twitter to tap into pornography as a source of revenue while simultaneously making it even more important to the world of pornographic advertising and content creation.
Twitter’s Red Team believed that pornography would allow the company to “fund infrastructure engineering improvements to the rest of the platform,” and was “consistent with Twitter’s principles in free speech.”
Does the internet need another porn outlet?
Despite this, the program was deemed to be untenable, as the company was incapable of policing the new revenue stream in a way that would fend off congressional scrutiny, legal trouble and an explosion of child pornography.
“There are several challenges to maintaining this as a top priority. … [Twitter is] thinking about health as a parallel to monetization, instead of as a prerequisite,” the report said, criticizing executives’ approach to health and safety, The Verge reported
Twitter’s health team has since been combined with a team identifying spam accounts to combat claims of fake accounts by Elon Musk.
Musk has been involved in a lengthy legal battle with Twitter over a deal to purchase the website.
Twitter and OnlyFans did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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