Twitter: La la la, we haven't heard of NUDE JLaw, Upton SELFIES

If there are any on our site it is not our fault as we are not a PUBLISHER

Twitter's top policy bod has refused to dismiss claims that people who tweet the leaked private photos of naked female celebrities are having their accounts suspended on the social meeja site.

The company's Nu Wexler told The Register:

We do not comment on individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons. Our rules outline content boundaries on the platform.

He pointed us to a link on Twitter's support site, which makes it clear that "private information" cannot be tweeted without netizens first seeking "express authorisation and permission" to make those details public.

The "content boundaries" section also makes it clear that the unauthorised use of copyrighted material will not be tolerated on Twitter.

A cursory glance at Twitter's search function appears to show that it is now much more difficult to find the leaked photos of naked celebs that appeared overnight. Many might agree that such a massive privacy invasion should be stamped out by social networks.

It's a sticky problem for such firms, though, given that they are constantly dodging the publisher status bullet.

The agent of Hunger Games' star Jennifer Lawrence has already confirmed that the sexy photos of the 24-year-old are genuine. And the hunt is now inevitably being played out online to unmask the person or people responsible for the leak.

The latest uncorroborated rumour apparently pegs the blame on a 15-year-old boy called Tristan.

So the idiot who leaked these nude celebrity pictures forgot to cover his Windows PC name. Well done “Tristan" pic.twitter.com/gd0G5czM6I

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) September 1, 2014

Elsewhere, reports have prematurely speculated that the pictures were grabbed by pervy wrongdoers via a supposed exploit in Apple's Find My Phone feature. According to the Guardian, Cupertino remains puzzled by how the saucy pics were leaked.

As the story broke late yesterday, it was claimed that hackers had potentially accessed the Apple iCloud accounts of more than 100 celebrities, after anonymous posts featuring nude photos of 17 female stars appeared on anarchic message board 4chan. However, a number of celebrities have now said that the pictures are fake.

These so called nudes of me are FAKE people. Let me nip this in the bud right now. *pun intended*

— Victoria Justice (@VictoriaJustice) August 31, 2014

El Reg notes that images on Google image search - which belongs to another tech company that dismisses the "publisher" tag - have similarly been scrubbed clean(ish) of the naked JLaw pics. ®