Report: Twitter Planned OnlyFans Style Porn Competition but Nixed Plans Due to Inability to Police Possible Child Abuse

Earlier this year, Twitter launched a team to investigate the possibility of monetizing “Adult” content on the platform, in a way such as OnlyFans, selling subscriptions for porn stars to monetize content the project was called ACM: Adult Content Monetization.

The special team set to explore the possible revenue stream was labeled “Red Team”.  The specialized team was set to “pressure-test the decision to allow adult creators to monetize on the platform, by specifically focusing on what it would look like for Twitter to do this safely and responsibly.”

This was inciting for Twitter as OnlyFans, which is already profitable brings in 2.5 billion a year. Unfortunately for Twitter, an ugly problem that plagues the website reared its head and they killed the idea.

According to The Verge the Red Team quickly realized “Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale.”

This news comes as another blow to the company currently in a dispute with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, over the termination of his proposed takeover bid. Twitter also recently had a Whistleblower come forward and report them to many departments of the government over national security concerns.

The whistleblower “Mudge” is well known in the internet security community and was fired from Twitter earlier this year. He claims he was fired over trying to bring forward security concerns with the company, Twitter disputes this.

After the report came out from “Red Team” leadership at Twitter put the ACM idea to the side at least until they can put more health and safety measures in place.

The Verge reported:

But that did little to change the problem at hand — one that employees from across the company have been warning about for over a year. According to interviews with current and former staffers, as well as 58 pages of internal documents obtained by The Verge, Twitter still has a problem with content that sexually exploits children. Executives are apparently well-informed about the issue, and the company is doing little to fix it.

“Twitter has zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation,” Twitter’s Rosborough said. “We aggressively fight online child sexual abuse and have invested significantly in technology and tools to enforce our policy. Our dedicated teams work to stay ahead of bad-faith actors and to help ensure we’re protecting minors from harm — both on and offline.”

This isn’t much of a surprise as about 15 months earlier researchers on the team tasked with making Twitter safer sounded the alarm on Twitter’s tools for identifying child sexual exploitation (CSE).

A report from February 2021 states, “While the amount of CSE online has grown exponentially, Twitter’s investment in technologies to detect and manage the growth has not. Teams are managing the workload using legacy tools with known broken windows. In short (and outlined at length below), [content moderators] are keeping the ship afloat with limited-to-no-support from Health.”

This stems from the history of the company’s mismanagement. The report also reads, “These gaps also put Twitter at legal and reputation risk.”

The Verge also reports:

Earlier this year, NCMEC accused Twitter of leaving up videos containing “obvious” and “graphic” child sexual abuse material in an amicus brief submitted to the ninth circuit in John Doe #1 et al. v. Twitter. “The children informed the company that they were minors, that they had been ‘baited, harassed, and threatened’ into making the videos, that they were victims of ‘sex abuse’ under investigation by law enforcement,” the brief read. Yet, Twitter failed to remove the videos, “allowing them to be viewed by hundreds of thousands of the platform’s users.”

Unless the company can pull a rabbit out of a hat this news seems quite horrible. They seem to have eyes bigger than their stomach and are not able to moderate content appropriately to monetize things the way they would like.

Twitter continues to struggle to be profitable, unlike other social media platforms. In October they are set to go to court with Musk over the takeover bid that Musk had filed to terminate twice now. If they are unable to force Musk to buy the company some believe they may be a sinking ship or at least need a new direction.