According to a recent report from an unsourced tech analyst, Twitter may block upwards of 10 million of its users for posting pornographic material on their social network. The purge of explicit and adult content might not necessarily affect traditional businesses, but would certainly have a tremendous impact on the social network in its entirety.
Already posted in the guidelines
Despite the fact that people in the adult entertainment industry and other users alike are complaining about the possible move, it is important to realize that Twitter’s current content boundaries already blocks excessively violent media and pornographic media in their background image, header image, or profile image.
According to Twitter’s guidelines, adult and pornographic content can be tweeted on the network, but it is important that the user correctly label a tweet as ‘containing sensitive content’. According to the Twitter Media Policy, the social network does not actively mediate content. However, it is up to the user to mark the content appropriately as per the guidelines outlined in the Twitter Media Policy.
Originally predicted some time ago
Robert Peck – analyst for SunTrust Robinson Humphrey – predicted this purge some time ago. According to Peck, it is the investors who are pointing out the fact that these users are actively violating Twitter’s terms of service. Because Twitter is interested in expanding and attracting more investors, Peck suggested to Business Insider that these users would likely be purged in the eventual future.
Why this might be happening
Despite the fact that Twitter has remained silent on the predicted change, other analysts believe that the policy change could be attributed to the fact that Twitter shares experienced a disastrous drop just a month ago. After the leak of the social network’s revenue forecast, the plummeting share price took place before the company ever got a chance to address the drop in revenue during its earnings call.
Nielsen, the global television and digital data company, decided to pull its advertising campaign from Twitter after the leak was announced. The reason that was given for the pull was that a number of the promoted-tweets from Nielsen were promoted on pages that were related to pornography.
Given the fact that Twitter has some serious pleasing to do with its investors, and given the fact that Twitter seems to be unable to prevent these promoted-tweets from showing up on adult content, it might make sense for the social network giant to remove these users from its user base altogether.
Ultimately a smart move
Even though Twitter might lose some initial users and have some people complaining about censorship, it might be worth it in the long term as long as it means that people are actively taking Twitter seriously. While it might be nice to have people use the social network to swap pictures with one another, it would not be surprising in the least to see Twitter care more about what their potential investors are going to say about this change.