Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Twitter - Den of Iniquity or Paragon of Virtue... or Someplace in Between?


Twitter - Den of Iniquity or Paragon of Virtue or Someplace in Between


Recently there's been some coverage of Twitter's propensity for porn. Some research has shown that
one in every thousand tweets contains something pornographic. With 8662 tweets purportedly sent every second, that's quite a lot.

Now, this is not something that has escaped our notice here at Smoothwall HQ. We like to help our customers keep the web clean and tidy for their users, and mostly that means free of porn. With Twitter that's particularly difficult. Their filtering isn't easy to enforce and, while we have had some reasonable results with a combination of search term filtering and stripping certain tweets based on content, it's still not optimal. Twitter does not enforce content marking and 140 characters is right on the cusp of being impossible to content filter.

That said - how porn riddled is Twitter? Is there really sex round every corner? Is that little blue bird a pervert? Well, what we've found is: it's all relative.

Twitter is certainly among the more gutter variety of social networks, with Tumblr giving it a decent run for boobs-per-square-inch, but the likes of Facebook are much cleaner — with even images of breastfeeding mothers causing some controversy.

Interestingly, however, our back-of-a-beermat research leads us to believe that about 40 in every 1000 websites is in some way linked to porn — these numbers come from checking a quarter of a million of the most popular sites through Smoothwall's web filter and seeing what gets tagged as porn. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post reports that 30% of all Internet traffic is porn - the biggest number thus far. However, given the tendency of porn toward video, I guess we shouldn't be shocked.

Twitter: hard to filter, relatively porn-rich social network which is only doing its best to mirror the makeup of the Internet at large. As a school network admin, I would have it blocked for sure: Twitter themselves used to suggest a minimum age of 13, though this requirement quietly went away in a recent update to their terms of service.