Gay13: Twitter's Infamous Pedo Ring

Warning: There is an NSFW image in this post, but it is here for educational purposes.

I heard about this fairly recently and it's been lurking in the woodwork of the cesspool that is Twitter for years. I, however, didn't I didn't want it to be true. It is true. There's an apparent pedo ring on Twitter. Most users ask for teenage or pre-teen boys' nudes, but some request nudes from boys as young as nine years old. All in all, this is rather troubling, both for boys in this age range and for LGBT people who are often wrongly associated with pedophiles.

Pedo rings are typically the stuff of Internet legend. You hear about them and maybe see a couple of screenshots, but you don't ever actually see them in operation with your own eyes. The gay13 ring operates like this: The hashtag used in this particular ring starts with "gay" and ends in a preferred age. Pictures, dropbox links, requests, kik usernames, and other things can be found in this tag. I accessed it about two days ago and found the following:

I have more screenshots, but I don't want to crash your computer, so the three above will have to suffice. I missed the peak of the ring, but it's still going on and still a rather concerning thing. The fact that it's in plain sight like this makes me wonder if there's anything else heinous going on in the darkest corners of Twitter.