My first message is to Twitter users.

Twitter has a serious problem with both pedophilia and child porn (or "Child Exploitative Sexual Material" - CSEM, for short).

You might not know this, but you're sharing a platform with at least a few thousand self admitted pedophiles, and possibly hundreds of thousands of accounts sharing CSEM. I certainly didn't until a couple months ago, when I was opposing the idea of integrating them into "acceptable" society, for fear of "prosecuting thought crime". When I made that clear, an account going by the name "Pedonymous1" tried to convince me otherwise, which honestly doesn't surprise me. Twitter's big, and it's gonna have some deviants. Some. 

So I checked their profile, and was immediately struck by how much positive feedback they got, and their hundreds of followers, along with having been there since November of 2014. That means for five years, an active group of pedophiles had been gaining traction, trying to give it a happy, smiling face!

So I tried to finish the arguments I was in, and really hammer down that they aren't acceptable, and thought I'd succeeded. That is, until the same argument resurfaced almost a month later, and plagued my mentions with how bigoted I was. For opposing the normalization of pedophilia. So I started to look into these people harder, and found out they have a whole community of pedophiles trying to normalize it - and much bigger than Pedonymous's follower list.

Here's a brief glossary of the terms they use, for your perusal:

#MAP - Minor Attracted Person
#NOMAP - Non-Offending MAP
MAP "ally" - a non-MAP ally of MAPs
AoA - Age of Attraction
AoC - Age Of Consent
Pro-C - Pro-Contact (offense)
#ACMAP - Anti-Contact MAP
CSEM - Child Sexual Exploitation Material/Media
"Pedosexual" - an attempt to normalize the above
#YouthRights/#YouthLiberation - attempt to hijack civil rights to justify MAP
"Age-Gapped" - attempts to call adult/child sex okay

And there's more.

Suffice it to say, this is already bad enough. I also found networks of these people on other platforms, but this petition will focus on Twitter, and we'll see if they're willing to act appropriately on this matter. However, it gets worse. 

While looking through these profiles, analyzing their networks, etc, I found accounts with material nobody should have to see. ACTUAL child porn accounts. Everything from stolen pics of your kids to videos of kids stripping and having sex with each other and adults. Sometimes tens of thousands of followers an account! With many of those followers being the same sorts of accounts! Want to make it worse? Twitter allows people as young as THIRTEEN to use the platform, which means guess what - it's basically a huge talent show from which the worst kind of people can recruit "talent", and there's a group of people trying to make pedophilia socially acceptable, using cartoons much of the time to increase the appeal, and almost nobody knows about it!

So I started an awareness and action group, and called it "Anti Pedophile Action". I figured if I kept it neutral and decentralized, giving people info, and telling them to "do with it what they wanted", I could remain within Twitter's TOS, and help push some of these exploiters offline. Together with what is now 80+ other people, we've exposed a wide network of them, thousands wide, and millions of interconnected CP accounts, most of whom have a randomly generated name - showing they set it up quickly and easily. We've had some significant victories ever since, and for that, I'm glad. But it's not enough - not by a longshot. These accounts are like maggots, and playing whack-a-mole with accounts that can just spring back up to spread their exploitation and worse is just a way for people who care to go mad. So I have some solutions in mind.

I'm talking to you now, Twitter.

The state of disrepair into which you've let your platform fall is despicable, and I'm sure many people here can agree to that. Always trying to "innovate" the surface features of your platform, children are being more and more exploited the deeper one dares to go, and it's clear that something must be done. So here are some options, all of which would be dramatically helpful:

• Enhance your reporting feature to include - by default - an option to report child exploitation, and the promotion thereof.

It's not there! People actually have to GOOGLE how to report CSEM and pedos on your platform, because your reporting feature DOESN'T MAKE IT CLEAR. We can quickly report someone for being mean, but not for being a pedo around kids? How could you mess this up? Alright, next.

• Make a rule against MAPs on your platform!

That'd be easy. It would mean they couldn't groom kids, or be out in their literal advocacy of this sort of thing, and it would mean these ACTIVE COMMUNITIES of people who admit they want to have sex with minors, couldn't try to make that okay... around minors. Which brings me to my next point.

• IF YOU WON'T DO EITHER OR BOTH OF THE ABOVE, don't let children use your platform.

Raise the minimum age of accounts to 18, so at least while adults are talking about how okay it is to either want to, or act on a desire to, have sex with children, there won't be any kids around to be their "allies", or accounts that get to look like children when they're run by adults for grooming purposes. I posted a thing written by the FBI in 2011 which already shows that the problem is real, and real bad, even in 2006. Part of it said this:

"The Internet has dramatically increased the access of the preferential sex offenders to the population they seek to victimize and provides them greater access to a community of people who validate their sexual preferences. For example, NCMEC reports that one-third of child pornography possessors were known to also distribute child pornography. The United States Postal Inspection Service estimates that at least 80 percent of purchasers of child pornography are also actively abusing children."

It continues:

"The Internet has become the most prevalent technique used by child predators to network with one another, to produce, purchase and share child sexual exploitation material (CSEM), and to lure children into sexual relationships. It also has dramatically increased the preferential child predator's access to the population they seek to victimize and also provides them with greater access to a like-community of people who validate their sexual preferences."

Yeah. It was obvious well over a decade ago. Twitter, you're well over a decade late in adapting to this. As a result, a huge community of offenders, papered over by a thin veneer of non-offenders, has sprung up, and it's time you do something about it.

When I started APA, I came into a community known as "Pedo Hunters", and was generally well-received, but they've been doing your job for you for years. Meanwhile, pedophiles and apologists have accused me of a wide variety of distasteful things, and even called for my arrest, and the harassment of my associates, including the revelation of my personal information! Imagine that. But it's clear there's a problem here. And not just on Twitter, but everywhere else too. If they don't see the light and make good decisions going forward, I'll have to make similar petitions for their platforms. But with all the support for APA, this one will probably see significant success.

So to you, Twitter, we ask - while you watch the amount of signatures go up on this petition, what will your platform be known for from now on? The one which took a stand and did something about a problem, or the one which stood by and watched as children were exploited in front of you? This act scars millions of children for life, and causes irreparable damage to the social fabric holding things together, and every second you waste is another innocent exploited, in one way or another. So are you ready to finally do something about this?

Clock's ticking.