Child Sexual Abuse Material Discovered On Twitter Despite Elon Musk Vowing Its Removal 'Our Top Priority'

Despite Elon Musk vowing to block and remove child sexual abuse material from Twitter after he acquired the company, some content of that nature posted over the last few months was found by researchers on the micro-blogging platform.

While Musk has stated on Twitter that removing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) “will forever be our top priority,” more than 40 images posted to the platform between March 12 and May 20, which had previously been flagged, according to Stanford University researchers, were not removed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The researchers said finding the images on Twitter “indicated a lapse in basic enforcement,” according to the outlet. Musk has fired or laid off about 90% of Twitter’s staff and the platform has experienced outages and glitches recently, including when technical issues delayed Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ from officially announcing his bid for the presidency on May 24.

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What’s More: After being made aware of the issue, Twitter responded to the researchers last week, indicating it has made improvements to its CASM detection system, and the researchers noted Twitter had resolved the issue last month.

In February, Twitter said it was moving quickly and aggressively to combat child sexual exploitation (CSE) on its platform, noting evidence that it had reduced the amount of CSE images by banning a larger number of accounts that posted and interacted with the material.

“In January, we suspended ~404k accounts that created, distributed, or engaged with this content, which represents a 112% increase in CSE suspensions since November,” the company posted to Twitter on Feb 1.

Twitter appears to be decreasing its level of transparency, however, which could hinder researchers from detecting similar breaches, according to the publication, by announcing price increases for accessing its application programming interface (API). Researchers could face monthly charges of $42,000 or even higher to gain access to Twitter’s data, making it unaffordable.

“This is a significant blow to platform transparency,” said David Thiel, chief technologist of the Stanford Internet Observatory, according to the outlet.

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