ROCKLIN, Calif. — As millions of children get ready to open their iPhones, iPads, and other smart devices Christmas morning, SkM Consulting sent an urgent “tweet” and letter to Twitter’s CEO demanding that the popular social networking site immediately delete Twitter profiles targeting children with hardcore pornography.
Skillful Means Consulting (SkM), led by lawyer Craig Perra and his wife Michelle, discovered that pornographers are exploiting Twitter’s weak and poorly enforced antiporn policy and describe their findings, “Twitter is overflowing with hardcore pornography with no real restrictions to prevent child access.” Attorney Perra states,
“If you have an email address, Twitter gives you access to porn.”
The social networking site “supports more than 100 million active users, who fire off 250 million daily tweets,” says Laura Segall at CNNMoney in her December 19, 2011 article.
“Children use the site,” says Attorney Perra, “and it is clear that pornographers know this, too. Twitter’s porn problem is prolific. It compromises future investment and advertising dollars from legitimate companies.”
“Porn peddlers tweet kid-friendly search terms like Disney, Toy Story, Bieber, Tinkerbell, along with pornography links, explicit language, and graphic pictures (#disneyporn),” says Perra, founder of vicereport.com.
Michelle Perra, Mother and Chief “WTF” Officer of SkM, explains, “Twitter searches like Tinker Bell and Disney produce tweets with a children’s picture then linking to extremely pornographic videos and pictures. I never imagined that I’d have to demand that a company fix its #disneyporn problem.
“I was shocked to learn that hardcore pornography was linked to kid-friendly words and that the average age of exposure to Internet porn is 11. My son is 8; the thought is horrifying. One profile picture showed a young woman with a particular bodily fluid covering her face, and another depicting a naked girl spread-eagle with duct tape over her mouth.”
Skillful Means Consulting (SkM) – Help4Parents Division provides educational services and solutions to parent groups wanting to minimize their child’s exposure to pornography. SkM-Community provides leaders with critical intel to help solve what Newsweek recently called an epidemic: who is accessing pornography, what kinds, where, on what device and when … and how you can implement simple cost-effective practical solutions to keep kids off porn. It also runs http://www.vicereport.com, all the news covering the impact of pornography and sex addiction, new technology, and the related legal issues for families, community groups, religious institutions and employers, etc.