Twitter as 'porn hub' allowing psy-war targeting communal harmony: Report

Twitter is the 'porn hub' of social media, DisinfoLab said in a new report.

Shockingly, despite Indian laws and Twitter's own policies, even child porn and rape videos are freely available. Worse, Twitter's lax policy has allowed a massive psy-war targeting communal harmony, the report said.

Twitter has a full-fledged porn industry -- from live web cam to other ‘off-line services'. Numerous NSFW content selling websites openly advertise themselves on Twitter, including those who show their registration in India, it added.

These activities are not run in hiding but in broad daylight, advertising with hashtags. Live porn is openly sold on Twitter using the #IndianCamGirl hashtag involving a nexus of ‘service providers', it said.

The fact that the hashtag started in 2017, involves several influencers, and is used regularly is a testament to Twitter's unwillingness to address these concerns.

In the garb of such ‘services', personal data of the users are being mined, to be used for criminal activities from 'sextortion' to rape, to sexual exploitation of minors, leading to grave consequences, including suicides.

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"Anti-social/anti-India elements are taking advantage of this ‘free porn' environment of Twitter, weaponising the content. An elaborate psy-war is being waged to damage India's communal harmony, particularly between Hindus and Muslims," the report said.

"Hundreds of fake handles are running coordinated campaigns, dehumanising the women of both religions. These handles pretend to be Hindus (#hstuds) when demeaning Muslim girls (#mslut); and Muslim (#mstud), while demeaning Hindu girls (#hslut)," it added.

The behavioural pattern of these handles - creation date, activity, location and hashtag - clearly establishes an organised campaign designed to harm social harmony. Surprisingly, despite obvious Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour (CIB), Twitter doesn't seem to take any actions, the report said.

"Twitter, the US based for-profit company, seems obliged to follow only US laws, while showing complete dis-regard to India's IT Rules, which prohibits adult content on social media. Twitter doesn't even make any attempt to implement the laws, doable with basic location filter," the report said.

Contrast it with other social media platforms which do far better content management, and continue to strive to keep social media space clean. Shockingly, Twitter seems blind to even most obscene contents, including child porn despite a 'child sexual exploitation policy'.

"Twitter claims to have a ‘zero tolerance' policy towards child pornography - and yet seems to make zero efforts to counter this menace. It's important to remember that this content is available to even under age users, as Twitter doesn't filter 'sensitive content' to even young users," the report said.

"Equally shocking is freely available ‘rape videos' on Twitter, which are prohibited even under Twitter's policy of ‘gory content'. Even those video posts, which have words that could trigger filter mechanism are freely available, including the gang-rape video of a young girl," the report said.

Twitter has also failed to filter obscene content for young users. Even a minor user on Twitter can access most obscene content if they wish to. Worth noting that Twitter could easily filter particular kind of content on age and location restriction, if it wished to, DisinfoLab said.

"To access Twitter Hub, one need not even own a Twitter account. An open Google search could land anyone, even a minor, to most gory and vulgar contents available on Twitter with just a click on ‘view sensitive content'. Seems #Google also needs to take measures to control it," the report added.