Twitter could allow video content subscription option

Twitter is already very permissive when it comes to sharing explicit (NSFW) photos and videos, playing scenes ranging from extreme violence to pornography, with the introduction of an option to subscribe to content posted on certain accounts benefiting both the authors who get an easy way to monetize that content, but also Twitter, which can commission payments made by subscribers.

For now, Twitter doesn’t appear to be trying to become an OnlyFans alternative, with the clips intended to be hidden behind the subscription option being shorter and uploaded at much lower resolution. Nor are the payment options evaluated very diverse, with content authors having to choose from a grid of pre-set rates: $1, $2, $5 or $10. In addition, in the proposed formula, users who pay to access the clip will have the option to retweet it, and it remains to be seen whether their followers will be able to see the retweeted clips without paying.

There are also questions about how the paid clip option will be used by the very large community of authors promoting pornographic content on Twitter. The company is one of the few major social media networks that allows such content and estimates that about 13% of the content posted to its network is NSFW. Opening up options for charging for this form of content could raise all sorts of issues with both advertising partners and payment providers (e.g. banking institutions), most of which are institutions or companies that do not want to see their image associated with pornographic sites. There would also be the problem of the spread of content depicting scenes of child sexual abuse (CSAM), still far from being resolved on Twitter. In fact, it was precisely this issue that previously derailed Twitter’s plans to launch a paid subscription OnlyFans-style service, with the platform’s administrators failing to demonstrate that they could effectively control the spread of abusive content.