Large brands are considering pulling advertisements from Twitter after a Reuters investigation found their material next to tweets soliciting child pornography.
According to the report published on Wednesday, several brands have already pulled marketing from Twitter, including Dyson, Mazda, Forbes, PBS Kids, DirecTV, and Thoughtworks.
"We're horrified," Cole Haan brand head David Maddocks told the outlet. "Either Twitter is going to fix this, or we'll fix it by any means we can, which includes not buying Twitter ads."
Reuters said cybersecurity group Ghost Data helped identify more than 30 advertisers that appeared next to Twitter accounts peddling links to exploitative material like child pornography, human trafficking, and other forms of sex abuse.
The group also found over 500 accounts that "openly shared or requested child sexual abuse material over a 20-day period this month." Twitter reportedly failed to remove close to 70% of those accounts shared over the study period before removing 300 last week.
However, more than 100 identified accounts remained active until Reuters' report. The remaining accounts have since been deleted after Ghost Data's full disclosure of the problematic users.
Twitter sent an email to advertisers before the story's publication confirming that it had "discovered that ads were running within Profiles that were involved with publicly selling or soliciting child sexual abuse material" but disclosed little else.
The news comes as Twitter, which receives more than 90% of its revenue from digital marketing, is engaged in a prolonged legal battle with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, according to Insider.
Musk has attempted to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter after he alleged the company is overvaluing its shares and marketing scope by purposefully ignoring a large number of inactive spam accounts, thus inflating its user base.
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