Headline, February 20 2022/ PARENTS : ''' '' CHILD SAFETY CHIME '' '''

 

PARENTS : ''' '' CHILD

 SAFETY CHIME '' '''

UNDER MR MUSK'S OWNERSHIP - TWITTER'S HEAD OF SAFETY, Ella Irwin, said she had been moving rapidly to combat child sexual abuse material, which was widespread on the site - as it is on most tech platforms.

'' Twitter 2.0 '' will be different, the company promised. But a review by The New York Times found that the imagery, commonly known as child pornography, persisted on the platform.

All the while, people on dark-web forums discuss how Twitter remains a platform where they can easily find the material while avoiding detection, according to transcripts of those from an anti-abuse group that monitors them.

'' IF YOU LET SEWER RATS IN, '' SAID JULIE INMAN GRANT,  Australia's online safety commissioner, '' you know that pestilence is going to come.''

In a Twitter audio chat with Ms. Irwin in early December, an independent researcher working with Twitter said illegal content had been publicly available on the platform for years and garnered millions of views.

But Ms. Irwin and others at Twitter said their efforts under Mr. Musk were paying off. During the first full month of the new ownership the company suspended nearly 300,000 accounts for violating '' child sexual exploitation '' policies, 57 percent more than usual, the company said.

The effort accelerated in January, Twitter said, when it suspended 404,000 accounts. ''Our recent approach is more aggressive,'' the company declared in a series of tweets last week, saying it had also cracked down on people who search for the exploitation material and had reduced successful searches by 99 percent since December.

Ms. Irwin, in an interview, said the bulk of suspensions involved accounts that engaged with the material or were claiming to sell or distribute it, rather than those that posted it.

She did not dispute that child sexual abuse content remained openly available on the platform saying : ''We absolutely know that we are still missing some things that we need to be able to detect better. ''

She added that Twitter was hiring employees and deploying '' new mechanisms '' to fight the problem. ''We have been working on this nonstop,'' she said.

Wired, NBC and others have detailed Twitter's struggles with child abuse imagery under Mr. Musk. Last week, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, asked the Justice Department to review Twitter's record in addressing the problem.

To assess the company's claim of progress, The Times created an individual Twitter account and wrote an automated computer program that could scour the platform for the content without displaying the actual images, which are illegal to view.

The material wasn't difficult to find. In fact, Twitter helped promote it through recommendation algorithm - a feature that suggests accounts to follow based on user activity.

Among the recommendation was an account that featured a profile picture of a shirtless boy. The child in the photo is a known victim of sexual abuse, according to the Canadian Center for Child Protection, which helped identify exploitative material on the platform for The Times by matching it against a database of previously identified imagery.

That same user followed other suspicious accounts, including one that ''liked'' a video of sexually assaulting. By Jan 19, the video, which had been on Twitter for more than a month, had gotten more than 122,000 views, nearly 300 retweets and more than 2,600 likes.

Twitter later removed the video after the Canadian center flagged it for the company.

In the first few hours of searching, the computer program found a number of images previously identified as abusive - and accounts offering to sell more. The Times flagged the posts without viewing any images, sending the web addresses to services run by Microsoft and the Canadian Center.

One account in December offered a discounted ''Christmas pack'' of photos and videos, That user tweeted a partly obscured image of a child who had been abused from about age 8 through adolescence. Twitter took down the post five days later, but only after the center sent the company repeated notices.

In all, the computer program imagery of 10 victims appearing over 150 times across multiple accounts. The accompanying tweets often advertised child rape videos and included links to encrypted platforms.

Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the former top security executive at Facebook, found the results alarming. ''Considering the focus Musk has put on child safety, it is surprising they are not doing the basics,'' he said.

The concern and sadness of this publishing, continues into the future. The World Students Society thanks authors Michael H. Keller and Kate Conger.

With most respectful dedication to the Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society, and then All Social Media, Grandparents, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. 

See ya all prepare and consider Great Global Elections on !WOW! - the exclusive ownership of every student in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless