Some major advertisers, including Dyson, Mazda, Forbes and PBS Kids, have suspended or removed their ads from certain areas of Twitter after they appeared alongside tweets calling for child pornography.
Walt Disney, NBC Universal, and Coca-Cola, as well as a children’s hospital, were among more than 30 advertisers who appeared on the profile pages of Twitter accounts and posted links to exploitative material, some of which included words like rape and adolescents, and were shown alongside advertised tweets from corporate advertisers, according to a new study by Ghost Data on child sexual abuse online.
In a statement, Twitter spokeswoman Celeste Carswell said the company has “zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation” and is devoting more resources to child safety, such as hiring new bodies to write policies and implement solutions. Twitter is working with its advertisers and partners to investigate the incident and prevent it from happening again.
Twitter, which bans depictions of sexual exploitation of children, allows adult content in general and hosts a thriving exchange of pornographic images, which account for about 13% of all content on Twitter.
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters
