There’s a network within a network on Twitter. An open network made up of hundreds of international accounts, busy exchanging material concerning child pornography on Twitter. They have been active for many months now and up until now have gone unnoticed by those who control the website.

This is all revealed by L’Espresso in its report, to be found on the newsstands on Friday and also visible on Espresso+, thanks to a reader who allowed us to understand the extended network of profiles concerning child pornography, by following the contacts of one single account. A very vast system that the Postal Police is now working on and that, after the charge made by the weekly, the same network is providing to demolish.

How a child pornographer twits

Esclusivo

La rete di pedopornografia su Twitter Quel network dell'orrore che cinguetta

Mauro Munafò

1/10/2014

These accounts vary in the way they behave, case by case. There are people who frequently share photographs and videos with very explicit images and instead there are those who prefer to answer the tweets of others or leave a comment, generally in English, Arabic or Spanish. There are also those who remain silent, after having sent some photographs and wait while looking at contents sent by others.

The majority of the profiles and contents of this unsettling group is totally visible by the users as well as on search engines like Google, while only a small part of the criminals hide their photographs and must personally approve their followers before they can have access to this material.

The lack of concern for secrecy is also shown by the use of explicit images in their profile photographs or on their cover, (a large horizontal photograph used on the personal pages of Twitter) and it is not rare to actually find hashtags used by the community of pedophiles to signal contents to each other according to their value.

The rules of the system

[[ge:espresso:plus:articoli:1.182569:article:https://espresso.repubblica.it/plus/articoli/2014/10/01/news/se-la-pedopornografia-abita-su-twitter-l-orrore-e-in-chiaro-sul-social-network-1.182569]]Twitter’s conditions of use are very clear in prohibiting the use of the website for illegal purposes and a specific policy also exists that protects minors: “We do not tolerate child sexual exploitation on Twitter”. The document says: “When we are made aware of links to images promoting child sexual exploitation they will be removed from Twitter without further notice and reported to The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children ("NCMEC"). We permanently suspend accounts promoting or containing updates with links to child sexual exploitation.”

However, with 500 postal tweets a day, we are not surprised by some flaws in the control system. If it is true that the majority of accounts mentioned by “L’Espresso” have been removed a few hours after our charge was made to the Postal Police, some profiles have survived. Or they have used other precautions.

Many child pornographers, hidden within chats and perhaps concerned by a possible removal from Twitter, send a link with a brief biography to other virtual places where they can be met and probably exchange illegal material, far from indiscreet eyes. In fact instant messages such as the apps for smart phones like Kik, Snapchat and even the popular Whatsapp are used for this kind of traffic, as they are considered safer and harder to be traced by the police, often mistakenly.

Versione integrale in italiano su E+