Twitter Inc (NYSE: NYSE:TWTR) may face a federal investigation which could cost the company billions in fines. Reason: the company is not equipped to properly police harmful sexual content on the platform.
Twitter may have broken the consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission when the company reportedly found in an internal study this year that it doesn’t adequately stop underage users from viewing and uploading porn, the New York Post quoted former FTC officials saying.
In an interview with the New York Post, former FTC Chairman William Kovacic said that Twitter could be hit with a fine in the range of $5 billion if it is found to have violated the consent decree by failing to protect underage users.
According to a report by Verge, a team of Twitter employees recently discovered that the company could not safely allow adult creators to sell subscriptions on the social media platform.
Twitter is exploring opportunities to monetize adult content on the site, but has paused the process until it put safety measures in place.
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“Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale,” Verge quoted the team saying.
The team found that the company also lacked tools to verify that adult content creators and consumers were of legal age.
Verge has reported that Twitter still has problems with content that sexually exploits children. Unfortunately, even though the company is well-informed about the issue, it is doing little to fix it.
According to the New York Post, under a consent decree signed in 2011, Twitter “shall not misrepresent” the extent to which it protects the security and privacy of users. According to FTC officials, the alleged problems with porn moderation could qualify as undisclosed user privacy and security problems.
If Twitter can’t control which users view or upload porn, "then it’s reasonable to conclude that they would violate the 2011 prohibition not to misrepresent security and privacy of users," Kovacic added.
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