Accounts that spread child abuse content flood some X ‘hashtags’

In 2026 it is still extremely easy to find child sexual abuse material on X, formerly Twitter. Some apparently innocuous hashtags are filled with illegal videos of minors, EL PAÍS has found. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he said that ridding Twitter of the hashtags for child pornography and trafficking in minors would be his “top priority.”

Four years later, however, the situation has not changed. X is still full of sexual videos involving minors in plain view. “There is a mistaken idea that child sexual abuse material is confined to the darkest corners of the internet,” says Jacques Marcoux, research director at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. “The reality is that many images and videos of child sexual abuse circulate in plain sight on mainstream social media platforms that millions of people use every day,” he adds.

In many cases, a simple keyword search is enough for this type of content to pop up. Often it is under hashtags with no apparent relation to pornography. EL PAÍS is not disclosing these hashtags so as not to increase their distribution. However, the newspaper did send the company a request for information that received no reply.

The aim of the offenders who post these videos is to attract interested users to more closed platforms where they can make money, such as Telegram or Discord: “They use major social networks as a funnel to attract an audience with a sexual interest in minors: they promote sexualized images of children or of victims who are already known, then redirect that traffic to other websites or platforms where such material is offered,” Marcoux adds.

In 2025 X was only the seventh major platform to report new videos to the reporting line of the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Several Meta networks, such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, ranked higher. These reports are voluntary: they do not indicate the total amount circulating, only the cases reported to the Center.

Until mid-2025, X used technology from a platform called Thorn, a nonprofit co-founded by Ashton Kutchner and Demi Moore (now both detached from the organization) that provides tech companies with tools to detect and combat child sexual abuse material. Thorn has not responded to this paper’s messages, but last summer confirmed it had terminated its contract with X for nonpayment of recent invoices: “We recently terminated our contract with X for nonpayment,” Cassie Coccaro, Thorn’s head of communications, told NBC.

New European regulation

Although Europe has different legislation, it has not yet been applied in these cases. “Platforms can do much more than they are doing on this issue,” says Borja Adsuara, a lawyer specializing in digital law. “The European Commission has already begun enforcing the Digital Services Act (DSA) with cases against X and other networks, although focused on disinformation and Grok deepfakes.”

The regulation obliges networks like X to identify and assess the risks on their service, including illegal content and negative effects on minors. “Platforms that succeed at blocking this material usually rely on a combination of methods, including the use of hash-matching technology that allows moderation systems to detect when a known image has been uploaded, so it can be blocked and removed immediately,” says Marcoux.

New images are harder to detect. For that, models trained to recognize the visual characteristics of abuse are used to estimate the probability that a never-before-seen image is child sexual abuse material. Thorn, for example, applies this technique by analyzing scenes frame by frame. The trade-off is that these systems work with probabilities and require human review.

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