Say it ain’t so! Don’t censor us Twitter, like all those other wildly profitable social media platforms.
According to SunTrust Robinson Humphrey tech analyst Robert Peck, Twitter is preparing to purge an estimated 10 million porn-posting users. Ditching such a large chunk of users sounds drastic until you do the math: Twitter claims to have 302 million monthly users, so getting rid of the explicit posters will only account for about 3 percent of its total—although that’s just counting the users and not their followers. Twitter is a one-stop shop for all your media needs, whether you want to catch up on news, message a celeb in real time, or browse explicit images posted by adult stars. Purging the porn will surely upset millions of users, and would certainly put a dent in Twitter’s hip freedom of speech reputation.
Social media has altered the way fans interact with porn stars—arguably none to the degree Twitter has. Fans have real-time direct access to their favorite performers. “Twitter is one of the few large social media platforms that doesn’t apply a lot of censorship rules to our images so by default it’s a network tool in the adult industry,” says adult actress Mercedes Carrera.
Like many others, Carrera is worried about the types of changes recent headlines might encourage Twitter to make. One week after Twitter’s revenue forecast was reported to be below expectations and deemed a “nightmare earnings scenario,” Nielsen, a global television and digital data company, pulled its advertising campaign after discovering paid promoted tweets on pornography-associated pages. “I don’t think adult content is the reason Twitter’s stock plummeted but adult content is always an easy scapegoat in society, always,” says Carrera.
Mercedes Carrera
