Warning on easy Twitter access to porn

Children are a tweet away from hardcore porn…and there are no safe settings to protect them.

It was the family friendly website that let you tell the world in 140 characters what you had for breakfast.

But there is now a much darker side to the social media giant Twitter.

The baby blue tweeting bird logo has been hijacked by hardcore pornography companies who are using the social media site which has no age restrictions to pump out adult content.

An army of X-rated websites have set up Twitter accounts and are ‘tweeting’ hardcore images and films and there is no way to avoid it.

There are no settings on the social media site to filter out the XXX content, and simply typing the word “sex” into the search window will bring up a stream of hardcore images.

And while Prime Minister David Cameron has come down hard on search engines such as Google for their faltering attempts to restrict pornographic sites, there has never been any attempt to address this issue with regard to social media sites.

Children can easily stumble across adult content, and find far worse if they search for it.

Parents have long been warned by child protection experts of the importance of placing restiction on the websites their children can access. But few would imagine that this most well-respected and seemingly family-friendly brand could harbour such content and be so dangerous.

Even those who attempt to restrict the content on Twitter are unable to do so, as there are no options to filter the tweets a user views, or the Twitter accounts they find in searches.

With the explosion of smart phone technology, youngsters of all ages are now only a few clicks away from XXX material and parents are powerless to stop it.

While search engines can be set up to stop children from accessing adult sites, there is no way to filter porn on the social media site. And Twitter is not alone.

Our investigation found adult content on Facebook and YouTube that could be accessed just as easily.

Using an iPhone, our reporter tried to access material using the search term “porn”. In each case, we put filters and restrictions in place to remove all applications unsuitable for children.

But despite our attempts to block porn searches, we found each site was awash with hardcore sex videos which appeared within seconds.

It has sparked urgent calls for a law change to bring in age restrictions for people using all social media sites.

Vivienne Pattison, director of campaign group Mediawatch UK, said: “This is concerning. It shows that there is no magic bullet to protect children online and that parents need to wise up to this.

“But we also need to look at how social media sites are going to protect our children in the future. If you search for porn using a smartphone on Twitter, then there it is. I think that is wrong.”

Kirsty Hopley of Cumbria-based charity Child Eyes, which campaigns to protect children from sexual images, was shocked by our findings.

But she fears pornography is “owning the internet at a fantastic speed” and warned access to explicit material may be “uncontrollable”.

Kirsty, a mum-of-two from Carlisle, said: “It is a great sadness that such an amazing tool is becoming so dangerous.”

A survey by children’s mental health charity YoungMinds revealed about half of 15 to 17-year-olds have accessed porno on a phone or tablet. The poll of 2,000 people also suggested that a third of 11 to 14-year-olds had watched porn on a mobile device.

This month, a 13-year-old boy from Blackburn, Lancashire, will be sentenced for raping his eight-year-old sister after watching porn. He told police he “decided to try it out” after watching X-rated material with a friend on an X-box games console.

Lucie Russell, director of campaigns at YoungMinds said: “For many children and young people exposure to online pornography is their sex education. What they see are often violent portrayals of sex that lack the respect they need to understand healthy sexual relationships. For many, understanding what constitutes consent is also becoming very blurred.”

Prime Minister David Cameron announced new measures to protect children from accessing potentially harmful content online, last year. Family-friendly filters are now being introduced which will allow more than 90% of households in the UK the option to block pornography. But they will do nothing to address the dangers posed by easy access to porn on the sites we have investigated.

Baroness Howe has introduced an Online Safety Bill, which, if passed, would make porn only accessible to people over 18 who “opt-in”.

YouTube and Facebook policies dictate that only users over 13 can sign up. Twitter said its sevices are not directed to under 13s and that it would delete private information provided by under 13s.

A Twitter spokesman said it provides safety resources for parents, teachers and teens in its safety centre.