September 30, 2022
Major Brands are Blasting Twitter and Stopping their Ad Campaigns! Find out why here!
Big news to share! Please see my statement sent earlier today to the press!
Press statement:
Enough Is Enough® Urges Businesses to Reconsider Advertising on Twitter as Platform Pairs Marketing Campaigns Alongside Child Sexual Abuse Material
Major brands including Mazda, PBS Kids, Dyson, Forbes and DIRECTV recently suspended their marketing campaigns or removed their ads from parts of Twitter after learning their promotions appeared alongside tweets soliciting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), formally called child pornography, according to Reuters.
It was reported that there were 30 advertisers, which also included the likes of Walt Disney Company, Coca-Cola, NBCUniversal, that appeared next to the profile pages of Twitter accounts active in selling and soliciting CSAM. Company executives were “horrified” to learn that sexually exploitative tweets including key words related to "rape" and "teens” appeared alongside their company’s promoted tweets from corporate advertisers.
In one example, a promoted tweet for shoe and accessories brand Cole Haan appeared next to a tweet in which a user said they were "trading teen/child" content. David Maddocks, brand president at Cole Haan, told Reuters, "Either Twitter is going to fix this, or we'll fix it by any means we can, which includes not buying Twitter ads."
Enough Is Enough® (EIE), the nation’s leading non-profit fighting to make the internet safer for children and families since 1994, applauds the response of leading corporations to distance themselves from Twitter. EIE focuses its efforts on four pillars, one of which is ADVOCATING FOR GREATER CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY. EIE encourages the corporate community at large to proactively stand up for the innocence and dignity of children by disassociating their brands from digital platforms and services who knowingly facilitate child exploitation.
In 1997, at the first Children’s Internet Safety Summit, EIE authored the technology industry’s “ZERO Tolerance” policy against child pornography, adopted by industry leaders. As EIE’s third pillar, we advocate for the technology industry to implement corporate responsibility polices aimed at preventing the online sexual exploitation of children.
Despite Twitter’s claim of having “zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation,” their lack of immediate action to identify and promptly remove CSAM has been a longstanding issue. Twitter’s toothless policies, are useless unless they are enforced.
Sadly, Twitter gets a big fat “F” for their failure to respond to victims whose videos and pictures of torturous child sex abuse appear on Twitter, Instead, Twitter, claims it cannot be held accountable for disseminating illegal material.
A federal lawsuit has been filed against Twitter ( John Doe #1 and John Doe #2 v. Twitter ) on behalf of two minors who were trafficked on their site. Illegal images were posted and shared on Twitter’s platform. The videos of both plaintiffs reportedly accumulated 167,000 views before law enforcement intervened and Twitter took the video down. In fact, when initial complaints were made to Twitter, instead of removing the exploitative videos, Twitter did nothing, even reporting back to the family of John Doe #1 that the video in question did not in fact violate any of their policies. The lawsuit states, “Twitter has enabled and profited from CSAM on its platform, choosing profits over people, money over the safety of children, and wealth at the expense of human freedom and human dignity.”
Additionally, Twitter provides a safe haven to a flourishing network of explicit pornography, which reportedly comprises approximately 13% of all content on Twitter. “Pornography and other forms of consensually produced adult content are allowed on Twitter, provided that this media is marked as sensitive,” according to Twitter’s Safety and Cybercrime Center. It is beyond the scope of reason that Twitter could possibly, on its own accord, be in a position to deem whether “consensually produced adult content” is in fact, “consensual”, and if those depicted in the images are in fact, adults.
Further, today’s mainstream pornography is not protected speech under the First Amendment as it is deemed obscene under U.S. Federal Law, depicting rape, incest, torture, group sex, strangulation, bestiality, and eroticized racism. Yet, any child with a Twitter account (easily created using a fake birthdate) has full access to graphic and illegal pornography.
Until Twitter can join the ranks of other platforms that are taking greater strides to protect the innocence of children on the internet as a display of corporate responsibility, they have no business doing business, and advertisers should follow suit of other brands who have suspended or stopped their advertising.
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Donna's Signature
Donna Rice Hughes
President and CEO
Enough Is Enough®