Tens of thousands of Twitter users may have just made child pornography go viral.
A video of a supposedly 14-year-old girl performing oral sex on a male, in public, has been mentioned more than 57,000 times since about 2 a.m. ET, according to statistics from Topsy, a social media search engine. That has spawned three different trending hashtags, two which use the girls real name.
The Daily Dot will not publish the name of the girl because she is a minor and may have been the victim of a sexual assault. (Most media outlets do not publish the names of sex-crime victims.)
“It is strictly against Twitter’s rules of use to post images of or links to content promoting child pornography,” said a Twitter spokeswoman, in a statement to the Daily Dot. “In instances where we identify links pointing to images of possible child pornography that are hosted off of Twitter, we attempt to notify the site hosting the content. We are monitoring reports related to this case and will apply our policy on child pornography, as outlined here, whenever appropriate.”
Twitter did not address its own role in spreading the child’s name through its Trending Topics feature, which highlights the most popular words and phrases currently on Twitter.
A Twitter account claiming to be the girl the video started a Twitter account appeared today, and the account posted messages in defense of the girl’s actions. That account gathered more than 16,000 followers before it was suspended at about noon Eastern.
“i will not let yhu kick me when im down i will trust god,” the account tweeted .”4 DA LAST TIME I WASNT REALLY SUCKING NO D— IT WAS NOT WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE! I AM INNOCENT.”
