Twitter’s porn problem has caused some brands to halt their advertising campaigns after companies saw promoted tweets turn up on pornographic profile pages.
Nielsen, a media data company, pulled its ads after spotting them on profile pages called ‘Daily Dick Pictures’ and ‘Homemade Porn’. Twitter said it usually blocks advertisers content from x-rated sites, but a bug had allowed Nielsen tweets to slip through.
“As Twitter works to resolve this issue, we have temporarily suspended our campaign,” a Nielsen spokesman told Adweek.
A Twitter spokesman told the Independent that the company is aware that promoted tweets are being displayed on some profiles that contain inappropriate content. “Our product team is working to fix the issue,” the spokesman said.
Duane Reade, the US pharmacy chain, NBCUniversal and Gatorade fell victim to the supposed bug and saw their tweets in pornographic feeds, according to reports.
Twitter is in the tricky position of maintaining free speech on a social media platform while appeasing advertisers who may prefer not to be associated with some of the views aired on Twitter’s 300 million active accounts – whether those views are terrorist, pornographic or otherwise.
It has recently tried to crack down on offensive content with the introduction of a quality filter that removes such tweets from users’ timelines.