LONDON — The U.K.’s Channel 4 News recently featured Lexi Lowe and Jasmine Jae discussing the adult starlets’ use of Twitter as a promotional tool.
The segment was part of Channel 4’s investigation into Twitter’s porn community, airing during the primetime 7 p.m. slot on February 17 — and included scenes from a lingerie-clad photo shoot that Lexi and Jasmine performed together several days earlier for Mayfair magazine, a Paul Raymond publication.
“When I first came into the industry one of the first pieces of advice was to get on Twitter,” Jasmine told Channel 4 News. “It’s about building your profile.”
“You can see who’s shooting and it’s a good way of contacting people,” Jasmine added. “97 percent of the work I’ve got is [from] me approaching people and them approaching me on Twitter.”
Boasting more than 120,000 Twitter followers between them, Jasmine and Lexi seek to attract the largest fan base they can — as long as those fans are of legal age — and take active steps to deter any underage followers. This deterrence is increasingly needed, with recent data from eMarketer suggesting that approximately 13 percent (or roughly seven million) of Twitter’s users are under 18 years old.
“You can have a warning which comes up every time you post a picture which says click if you want to see it, so it doesn’t just come up on someone’s screen. They have to click to see it,” Lexi explains. “That’s as censored as Twitter gets [so] I try to be clear on my bio that it’s an 18+ account.”
With the topic of online age verification and the need to protect minors from age-inappropriate content on the U.K.’s front burner, Twitter’s use as a conduit for porn is coming under scrutiny — with Channel 4 reporting that “roughly one in every thousand tweets is a pornographic image with as many as 500,000 sexual images posted daily, including images of hardcore and extreme sexual practices.”
For its part, Twitter reports that porn accounts for only 0.1 percent of its daily content.
According to the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection’s Executive Director, Tim Henning, many social media networks are heavily populated by underage users, making their adoption by porn promoters problematic, unless precautions are taken to protect children from this material. Among the services offered by ASACP are formalized Best Practices, including those for adult marketing on Twitter and other social networks.
“Minors make up a significant portion of Twitter’s user base,” Henning explains, “and while the service is a fertile field for performers building their fan base, it is important that these fans be of legal age.”
It is a stance that responsible adult entertainment industry operators embrace.
“I think Twitter should look at filtering and putting in an 18+ restriction,” Mark Hassell of Paul Raymond Publications says. “I think everyone in the adult industry would think that’s the right thing [because] we have children and younger family members and [we] don’t want them seeing stuff that is too full-on and inappropriate.”
Any measures might help, as the benefits of Twitter for performers, studios and other firms seeking to connect with fans and customers is sure to keep it squarely in the sights of adult marketers — especially since a new deal with Google makes tweets much easier to search and a boon to the social media signals that Google’s traffic bestowing search algorithm increasingly relies upon.
“I gained a few hundred followers in the space of five minutes whilst it aired,” Lexi says. “Appearing on the news was a far bigger promotional tool for me than Twitter. The news piece very clearly showed my Twitter profile so it was easy for viewers to find me.”
As might be expected, not all of Channel 4’s fans were pleased with the pair’s television appearance.
“The feedback has been mostly positive,” Jasmine adds. “Of course you have the usual anti-porn propaganda, but in 2015, I think most people are well aware that porn is available on the Internet for free [and] I think the majority of people would agree that better parental control is needed instead of censoring adults.”
The Mayfair magazine photo shoot will be showcased in its March issue, on sale March 6, and features both Lexi and Jasmine on the cover.
A digital version will be available at DigitalMagazines.xxx.
