According to the association, its Best Practices were developed to help businesses to maximize their ability to stop online child pornography and help parents to protect their children from unknowingly viewing age-inappropriate content on the Internet.
"The adult entertainment industry is always an early adapter of technology," ASACP CEO Joan Irvine offered. "So, it's no surprise that as Twitter's popularity continues to grow, more of the industry will participate in this free social networking and micro-blogging service."
"We feel it's important to make sure everyone is doing what is possible to protect children on Twitter," she stated. "On Facebook and MySpace you can have some control over the age requirement for someone to 'friend' you; however, many people have no idea of the age of people following them on Twitter. This in turn means that posting a link to adult entertainment could unintentionally lead a child to age-inappropriate content."
"Granted there are no perfect solutions, but ASACP's Best Practices are the best tools available to protect children and your company," Irvine added.
The ASACP Twitter / Social Networking Marketing Best Practice states that "If you direct people to your site from Twitter, Facebook or other online social networks, ensure that all of your adult content pages are labeled with the Restricted to Adults (RTA) website label. This way, parental filters will be able to block access to your adult content and prevent children from being exposed to age inappropriate material."
"We want to make sure the industry can continue to benefit from the usefulness of Twitter, without experiencing a backlash from concerned parents, lawmakers or the service itself," Irvine said. "For example, it was because of the industry that MySpace grew so quickly. But look what happened: because of pressure from the Department of Justice, MySpace disallowed direct links from adult entertainers' pages."
"How much revenue did you lose when this occurred?" Irvine asks. "MySpace could have just required that all such sites be labeled with RTA and incorporate filtering tools for children under 18."
Irvine also noted that in only two years, more than 2.2 million sites have labeled with RTA and there are now more than five billion hits daily to these RTA-labeled pages; and that major parental control software such as Net Nanny and SurfSafely; operating systems from Microsoft and Apple; Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer and Safari, plus search engines like AOL and mobile carriers AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, all recognize RTA. Now, it's up to parents to do their part to monitor their children and install one of the many parental filtering systems available today.
"We encourage everyone, whether they are an ASACP member or not, to review our Best Practices regularly," Irvine concluded.