Twitter is reportedly planning to ban up to 10 MILLION accounts from its service in an attempt to clamp down on the amount of porn and adult content shared on the service.
A report from a Wall Street analyst has pointed to a network-wide purge targeting those that break the company's terms of service. No user is permitted to have pornographic or violent imagery as a profile picture or background image.
But explicit material can currently be tweeted on the network and is labelled as "containing sensitive content". Several porn stars have already spoken out against the possibility of being booted off Twitter.
"To block my freedom of expression and not be able to show the world what I am doing when I was previously able to post anything without fear of being kicked off? That's going to hurt," she told the Daily Beast.
Actress Mercedes Carrera added: "Twitter is one of the few large social media platforms that doesn't apply a lot of censorship rules to our images so by default it’s a network tool in the adult industry."
The analyst behind the prediction, Robert Peck from SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, explained that there has to come a time when Twitter axes these users.
"Twitter's technology should hopefully be able to identify these users, but it may take some time," he said.
The social network's CEO, Dick Costolo, recently admitted that Twitter "sucks" when it comes to dealing with trolls and abusive users.
He vowed to start "kicking people off right and left," in a leaked memo to the company in February.
The company appears to be making good on its promises - it has already banned revenge porn and "doxxing" - the process of revealing victims' names and addresses.
Twitter has - it claims - around 308 million active users. A 10 million drop is a metaphorical drop in the ocean for the social network in terms of a loss.
But it does send out a strong signal at a time when some advertisers are pulling out of using the network because of the number of adult-orientated tweets being sent.
No comments:
Post a Comment