Thread by @dappergander

I already did a thread today explaining why SRC USA is painted on the street in Tom Hanks' tweet from 2016.

But this does not explain why searching SRC on a Russian search engine turns up so many pictures of children in swimsuits.

So let's spend a few tweets doing that.
1/

https://twitter.com/dappergander/status/1282119838496890890

In very basic terms: a Russian image-sharing site called imgsrc (dot) ru was largely taken over by pedophiles.

Do NOT visit this site.

It has been known to be a haven for pedophiles for many years. Here's an article about it from 2014.
express.co.uk/news/uk/480960…
2/

By the time the 2014 article was written, IMGSRC had over 38 million pictures on it. Many, if not most, were harmless-- a Russian version of Photobucket.

But the pedophiles had started actively taking the site over by then, and within 3 years, it had been largely conquered.
3/

So complete was the transformation of imgsrc that by 2017, even searches on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for "imgsrc" or even "src" returned softcore child pornography, as detailed in this article.
sijmen.ruwhof.net/weblog/1782-ma…
4/

Since then, Google, Bing and other American search engines have filtered the results, as you might expect.

DuckDuckGo, the "free speech" search engine, still returns some images, but not as many as it once did.

That brings us to Yandex, the Russian search engine.
5/

Yandex prioritizes hits from Russian websites (which is not surprising, as Google prioritizes websites written in English), but additionally operates under Russian law which is more lax on child pornography.

Which means Yandex will happily return most images from imgsrc.
6/

Pizzagaters have known about this interaction of Yandex and SRC for a while. One recently did a video about it at the beginning of June.

So, when they started saying "search Wayfair SKUs + SRC" yesterday, it was a trap for the unsuspecting. They knew why it would work.
7/

I don't have the desire to spend any additional time on this topic, but I felt it was important for everyone to understand it.

Now you have a more complete picture: what the street markings in Tom Hanks' tweet mean; and why SRC & Yandex interact the way they do.
8/end