Twitter has a child sexual abuse material problem. Its executives are not only aware of the problem, but are obstinate in their refusal to properly tackle this growing crisis. A recent article in The Verge entitled “How Twitter’s Child Porn Problem Ruined Its Plans For An Onlyfans Competitor” has detailed exactly how Twitter has, in recent months, become more conscious than ever of the vastness of this problem on its platform. 

As reported by The Verge, “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.”

Problematic title aside — after all, the suggestion that “child porn” has somehow “ruined” Twitter’s opportunity to profit from the objectification and sexualisation of (predominantly) women is as grotesque as it is poor-in-taste — the article successfully highlights the fact that the platforming and facilitation of the euphemistically labelled “adult content” appears to be increasingly and intractably linked to child sexual abuse material. 

For example, reports from inside Twitter itself came to the conclusion that “Allowing creators to begin putting their content behind a paywall would mean that even more illegal material would make its way to Twitter — and more of it would slip out of view. Twitter had few effective tools available to find it.” 

Figures estimate annual global revenue at $100 billion

What the article doesn’t do is ask why this is happening. What links the implementation of paywalled porn by adult “content creators”, and a sudden uptick in the prevalence of child sexual abuse material? The answer is equal parts political and economic. 

To understand any given facet of the porn industry, it’s necessary to understand how the industry functions as a whole. Long gone is the misty-eyed nostalgia-soaked trope of the “dirty magazine under the bed” — the porn industry is a global behemoth. Figures estimate annual global revenue at close to $100 billion, with over 665 centuries worth of porn consumed in just one year, from one website. Porn is a worldwide marketplace, unconstrained by facile limitations such as customs borders, trade agreements or bureaucratic business regulations. 

Porn is often waved away as selling “sex”, or sometimes as selling a “fantasy”, as if “sex” can be separated from the physical body performing it and conceptualised in the abstract. This is a reductive and superficial analysis. What porn is actually selling — in the same manner as prostitution — is the body that performs those sex acts. 

This can be seen in the myriad categories that the human body is broken down into on any given porn site: “busty”, “blonde”, “anal”. Those who watch porn — overwhelmingly men — very specifically seek it out on these terms. On the most fundamental level, viewers discriminate on the basis of the physical body on the screen in front of them — they do not just want to view sex with anybody, or indeed, with any body (“sex in the abstract”). They want to view that particular woman (or to a lesser extent, that man). 

Research into the attitudes of men who purchase sexual access within the context of prostitution highlight this clearly. For example, research of punters across five different countries showed that more than 50 per cent had a preference for women that they perceived to be between the ages of 18 and  25. Further, when quizzed on his “preference” for different women, one punter in Amsterdam stated: “The black girls are pretty much down for anything, and the Eastern girls are eager to please. You learn who’s good at giving blowjobs, and who to avoid. [Being with colored girls] is exotic in its way.” 

In short, it is very specifically a particular type of physical body that is “required” by any given porn user. Once we understand this, it becomes much easier to understand why an increase in child sexual abuse material is an inevitability once the “adult market” is normalised and crystallised into its own commercial arena, ready to be mined for profit. 

Over forty years’ worth of data highlights that porn use is an escalating behaviour. What may start out as viewing videos of comparatively “benign” sex acts often very quickly leads to desensitisation, resulting in the viewer actively seeking out more degrading and overtly “taboo” content in order to achieve sexual gratification. What happens as a result? The market responds. 

The content does not just sprout up out of nowhere. It is a response to the demand of those viewers who are requiring new physical bodies to do new, increasingly depraved things. But the market is saturated. There are millions upon millions of videos all vying for the user’s attention, and new avenues of brutality must open up to yield profit. 

The porn industry has exceeded saturation for adult content

As a result, the leap from “consensual adult content” to “non-consensual and/or child sexual abuse content” is not only a possibility, but becomes expected. Online child sexual abuse material is one of the fastest growing “markets” within the wider commercial sex industry. It is of the utmost importance to understand that this is not happening for no reason. It is happening because there is a demand for it. The sex industry is exactly that: an industry. It functions and exists because there is profit to be gained from the products being sold. Those bodies now happen to include the bodies of children. 

Pulling the focus back to the basis of this article — the quashing of Twitter’s plan to set up its own stall in the marketplace of bodies — the recognition that child sexual abuse material appears wherever other sex industrialisation occurs should not be a surprise. The company’s own employees noted that “Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale”. 

This is just a natural consequence of the floodgates opening. The fact that the porn industry has already far exceeded saturation point for almost every type of adult content, occurring simultaneously with the physical and psychological desire to seek out horrors that one decade ago might have been unimaginable, necessitates the influx and availability of those horrors. The two are inextricably linked. 

Just as porn is inseparable from the bodies that engage in it, the marketplace has now become inseparable from the deluge of harrowing and nauseating content demanded of it. Twitter is right to put a stop to the monetisation of adult content, but to do so on the basis that child sexual abuse material is an unintended consequence misunderstands the issue. This is no longer a bug, but a feature of the porn industry at large.