(Featured, Jack Dorsey of Twitter.)

How broken is Twitter? I knew it was broken, but this is a whole other level of broken.

In the spring of 2022, Twitter considered making a radical change to the platform. After years of quietly allowing adult content on the service, the company would monetize it. The proposal: give adult content creators the ability to begin selling OnlyFans-style paid subscriptions, with Twitter keeping a share of the revenue.

Some executives thought Twitter could easily begin capturing a share of that money since the service is already the primary marketing channel for most OnlyFans creators. And so resources were pushed to a new project called ACM: Adult Content Monetization.

What the Red Team discovered derailed the project: Twitter could not safely allow adult creators to sell subscriptions because the company was not — and still is not — effectively policing harmful sexual content on the platform.

“Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale,” the Red Team concluded in April 2022. The company also lacked tools to verify that creators and consumers of adult content were of legal age, the team found. As a result, in May — weeks after Elon Musk agreed to purchase the company for $44 billion — the company delayed the project indefinitely. If Twitter couldn’t consistently remove child sexual exploitative content on the platform today, how would it even begin to monetize porn?

Somewhere, Musk is smoking a joint and giggling. But it wouldn’t particularly surprise me if some information ops group working for Musk is digging this up and seeding it through the media. Either way, his legal prospects look a lot better. And this sort of thing sheds light on why Jack Dorsey and so many others formerly associated with Twitter were urging him to buy it. Twitter is catastrophically broken as a company. It was so desperate for a business model that the world’s leading political social media platform was trying to go into porn. And couldn’t even manage that. 

Taking the Red Team report seriously, leadership decided it would not launch Adult Content Monetization until Twitter put more health and safety measures in place.

The Red Team report “was part of a discussion, which ultimately led us to pause the workstream for the right reasons,” said Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough.

So this is still on. It’s just been paused.

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.

Now I’m just a simple country lawyer, but this sounds like a crime to me.

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.”

That’s the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children set up and funded by Congress. AG Garland isn’t interested, I’m sure. Not unless Musk actually buys Twitter, at which point there will be a sudden interest in the issue.