Twitter Porn Causes Nielsen To Pull Promoted Tweet Campaign

Twitter’s problem with porn caused Nielsen to pull a Promoted Tweet campaign this week. Nielsen temporarily halted advertising on Twitter after its promotional tweets showed up on several account profile pages that featured X-rated photos and video.

Nielsen promos appeared on profiles called “Daily Dick Pictures” and “Homemade Porn.” Twitter ads aren’t supposed to display on profiles that post adult content. According to Adweek, which reported the story Tuesday, ads for Duane Reade, NBCUniversal and Gatorade also appeared adjacent to pornography.

“As Twitter works to resolve this issue, we have temporarily suspended our campaign,” a Nielsen spokesman told Adweek.

Twitter only started displaying ads on user profiles in the last few months and now indicates on its support pages that “Promoted Tweets will display on select user profiles that fit the targeting credentials configured for a campaign.”

This is obviously a huge issue for Twitter and other social networks that traffic in user-generated content while simultaneously asking brands to advertise. Businesses are understandably wary about being associated with inappropriate content.

A Twitter spokesperson told Adweek on Tuesday that it’s aware of and working on the problem.

We’ve emailed Twitter and Nielsen to see if there are any new developments and will update this post if we get a response.

Postscript: Twitter said today that it has stopped serving of Promoted Tweets to profile pages while it works to fix the issue. Here’s the company’s full statement:

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“We’re aware that Promoted Tweets were being displayed on some profiles that contain inappropriate content. We are actively working to address the issue, and have paused Promoted content on profile pages until we have done so.”