Animal abuse videos go viral on Twitter, raising concerns

Gruesome animal abuse videos have been widely circulating on Twitter in recent weeks, raising concerns about how the social media giant monitors its content with Elon Musk at the helm, according to a report.

One particularly disturbing video that has gained traction appears to show a live kitten being placed inside of a blender and killed, NBC News reported. 

A concerned parent from London told the outlet she discovered the sickening footage after hearing about it from her preteen son.

Laura Clemens, 46, said that her 11-year-old son came home from school and mentioned something about a cat in a blender clip on Twitter.

The mother went on the platform and typed in “cat.”

The search box automatically suggested she search “cat in a blender,” she said.

When she clicked on the suggested search, the graphic video instantly appeared, she told NBC.

The outlet replicated the process and quickly found the clip on Wednesday.

By Friday, Twitter appeared to have disabled autocomplete suggestions in the search bar.

Clemens said she was glad her son came and told her about it first before finding the video on his own with a simple “cat” search.

“I’m glad that my child has talked to me, but there must be lots of parents whose kids just look it up,” she said.

The animal abuse videos seem to have been circulating twitter since early May, according to Twitter posts.

Since Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, an alarming trend has emerged of animal cruelty videos circulating without being immediately taken down, NBC reported.

After Musk purchased the company in October, he immediately laid off 50% of its employees, with additional layoffs this February in an effort to cut costs.

Last week, violent videos of two tragedies in Texas also made the rounds on the platform.

Footage of the mass shooting at the Allen, Texas mall that left 9 dead showed mangled, blood-covered bodies on the ground on the sidewalk.

Another clip showed the unconscious gunman in a pool of his own blood after a police officer on the scene took him down.

Days later, a video of a truck mowing down a group of migrants on the side of a Texas highway showed up on Twitter feeds.

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety who admitted to censoring The Post’s Hunter Biden Laptop story in 2020, told NBC News that the company likely shut down a number of safeguards that were previously in place to stop these kinds of autocomplete problems.

Roth said the company had built a system to stop illegal or dangerous content — including gore and death videos — from appearing as autocomplete suggestions, which the company refers to as “type-ahead search.”

“There is an extensive, well-built and maintained list of things that filtered type-ahead search, and a lot of it was constructed with wildcards and regular expressions,” Roth said.

The filter was monitored both by humans and automatically, he said.

“Type-ahead search was really not easy to break. These are longstanding systems with multiple layers of redundancy,” said Roth. “If it just stops working, it almost defies probability.”

Clemens told NBC she flagged the cat video on May 3 to Twitter’s support account and Ella Irwin, the vice president of trust and safety at Twitter and one of Musk’s closest advisers. 

“Young children know this has been trending on your site. My little one hasn’t seen it but knows about it. It should not be an autofill suggestion,” Clemens wrote.

The Post reached out to Twitter for comment.

The company responded with a poop emoji, it’s M.O. for responding in recent months.

Musk confirmed Friday that he has tapped NBCUniversal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino to be the next CEO of Twitter, effective in six weeks.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO will shift to a role as Twitter’s executive chairman and chief technology officer.