A day after researchers uncovered X’s intentions to test NSFW adult communities on the platform previously known as Twitter, the company has confirmed that Community administrators can now establish an “Adult Content” label in their settings to prevent the automatic filtering of their community’s content. Otherwise, all NSFW content will soon be filtered across X’s Communities by default. Communities are smaller groups within X, featuring their own feeds separate from the main timeline.
These changes seem to validate earlier tests of NSFW communities observed by various researchers and reverse engineers, indicating a shift towards a social network that more openly embraces adult content, a presence that has long existed on the platform.
NSFW (not safe for work) content has played a significant role on X, serving as a primary advertising platform for sex workers and hosting a considerable amount of adult content-focused bots and spam. According to internal documents obtained by Reuters in 2022, roughly 13% of all Twitter posts included NSFW content, such as nude photos, explicit videos, and other forms of pornography. Moreover, the documents revealed that adult content was among the fastest-growing categories on the platform, despite declines in news and sports content.
Recently, New York Intelligencer highlighted the proliferation of spam bots on X, which promoted NSFW content through links in their profiles, urging users to view “nudes in bio” or “pics in bio,” among other explicit terms.
Hello, friends! Check out the latest updates and improvements for X Communities.👇
Updates (With the latest version of the app):
– [All] Admins can now add topics to their Communities, and you can see topics linked to Communities on all devices.
– [All] Soon, NSFW content will…— Dongwook (@DongWookChung2) March 28, 2024
Among the extensive list of updates to X’s Communities is the confirmation that NSFW-focused communities can now self-designate to prevent automatic content filtering, unlike other Communities.
These changes, shared on X by an engineer and reshared by Musk, signify “Many upgrades to X Communities!” as remarked by Musk.
Communities, a product promoted by owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino during an all-hands meeting last fall, are considered essential to X’s growth strategy.
According to a transcript obtained by The Verge, Musk stated that while the Communities product was growing rapidly, there was still much work to be done to make Communities compelling. He also mentioned that X was witnessing significant percentage growth in Communities and had introduced new features, such as the ability to include any X account’s feed in the Community feed. However, there were no indications of plans for NSFW Communities at that time.
If X succeeds in establishing Communities as a successful product, it could potentially rival larger forum sites like Reddit and provide training data for Musk’s xAI-powered chatbot Grok, which has exclusive access to X content.
In addition to the announcement that Community administrators can now label themselves as including adult content, X will introduce a Ban button alongside Keep and Hide buttons on the Reported posts page, along with detailed messages explaining why a user is ineligible to join a particular Community. Furthermore, there will be temporary and permanent bans for spammers, tools to sort posts by Trending, Most recent, and Most liked, a Media tab for Communities on Android, and various bug fixes and minor improvements.
The upcoming features for Communities are extensive, including the ability for users to explore top posts and top communities across all Communities, tools to discover top communities and posts by topic, promotion and recommendation of Communities to potentially interested users on the For You tab, access for mods to Community Analytics, the ability to pin multiple members’ posts, support for spam filter levels set by admins, simplified reporting and moderation pages, and the introduction of audio Spaces in Communities, among other enhancements.
While X did not respond to requests for comment regarding an ETA for the listed items coming “soon,” the post suggests a new user interface for posts, with replies potentially on the horizon as well.
