Report: Twitter Vows to Crack Down on Revenge Porn

Twitter is set to crack down on revenge porn amid new rule changes on the platform, according to a report.

Users will be forbidden from posting “intimate photos or videos” of another person without consent under the new rules.

“Twitter’s definition of ‘intimate media’ includes content captured with a hidden camera that may involve ‘nudity, partial nudity, and/or sexual acts’; images that are sometimes called ‘creepshots’ that involve a user being able to see genitalia, buttocks, or breasts of another person; images or videos taken ‘in a private setting and not intended for public distribution’; and any other images that may be deemed private,” Tech Crunch reported. “The company noted that some forms of consensual nudity and adult content are permitted on the site and gave itself a pretty big loophole should it fail to respond to something that could be a violation of its policy in a timely manner.”

The loophole, it seems, is a requirement that victims must file a report to get content taken down.

“To help prevent our teams from making a mistake and removing consensual intimate media, we may require a report from the actual subject or their authorized representative prior to taking any enforcement action,” Twitter declared. “We will reply back to those reports via email and request that the subject provide documentation to verify their identity. Please note that this documentation will be destroyed once it is no longer needed by Twitter to evaluate the case and will not be shared with any third parties. We will not share any details about who reported this content with the violator.”

Victims of “creepshots” and “upskirts” won’t be required to file a report, however, “as it is often difficult for victims of this content to identify themselves.”

Earlier this year, lawyer Daniel Szalkiewicz criticized social networks for having “broken” revenge porn policies.

After accusing micro-blogging site Tumblr of ignoring removal requests for a revenge porn video featuring a seventeen-year-old girl, the lawyer declared, “The service providers turn around and say ‘yes we removed the images’, but what they don’t do is remove the accounts… Let’s say someone created a fake Facebook account using my name, and they put my naked photographs up there. I report the naked photographs to Facebook, Facebook will take down the photographs, but they leave the fake account with my name up there.”

“Facebook is very difficult as well because they don’t provide you with a direct line of communication like Google Legal does,” he continued. “They make you sign on to the service, and then they make you report one of three things. If you’ve ever actually looked through the process, it’s very complicated and difficult.”

In the Tumblr case, it allegedly took three weeks to get the video of the seventeen-year-old girl removed.

Szalkiewicz also claimed that intimate pictures shared without permission online often go undetected by the victims, who then receive a large amount of attention from strangers on the Internet without realizing why.

“What you find is that clients obviously don’t look at these websites; they don’t know whether somebody puts their photograph up online,” he explained. “The way they find out is suddenly their inboxes are flooded with Facebook friend requests, flooded with Instagram requests, saying ‘we saw your photograph, do you want to be friends?’ And obviously a lot of perverts are requesting a lot of additional information from them, and trying to essentially hit on them.”

In April, Facebook introduced an anti-revenge porn feature to their platform, creating a system to detect and block known illegal images.

However, despite this, a May report indicated that the social network was “flooded” with cases of revenge porn and sextortion, with nearly 54,000 cases of the crime reported in just a month; 33 of which involved children.

Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington and Gab @Nash, or like his page at Facebook.