X confirms plans for NSFW Communities

A day after researchers reported on X’s plans to test adult NSFW communities on the platform formerly known as Twitter, the company confirmed that community administrators can now set an “Adult Content” label in their settings to prevent content from their communities from being automatically filtered. Otherwise, all NSFW content will soon be filtered into X Communities by default. Communities are smaller groups of X with their own feeds outside of the main timeline.

The changes appear to confirm previous testing of NSFW communities spotted by various researchers and reverse engineers, and point to a social network that will now more directly embrace the adult content that has always been present on the platform.

NSFW (not safe for work) content plays a major role on X, which has been a primary venue for advertising sex workers and hosts a large amount of bots and spam focused on adult content. According to internal documents obtained by Reuters in 2022, approximately 13% of all posts on Twitter included NSFW content, such as nude and explicit photos, videos and other pornographic content. Additionally, the documents indicated that adult content was one of the fastest-growing genres on the platform, although news and sports were in decline.

New York Intelligencer also recently detailed the rise of spambots on the service now known as as “nudes in bio”, “photos”. in organic” and other more explicit terms.

Now included in a long list of X community updates is confirmation that NSFW-focused communities will be allowed to refer to themselves as such to avoid having their content automatically filtered, like in other communities.

The modifications, published on X by an engineer, were re-shared by Musk, who commented, “Many upgrades to X communities! »

Communities are something that owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino promoted at an all-hands meeting last fall as key to X’s growth plans.

According to a transcript acquired by The Verge, Musk explained that the Communities product was growing quickly but “there’s a lot of work to do to make Communities attractive.” He also shared that X was experiencing “rapid percentage growth” in Communities and had added new features, like the ability to include any For example, a community focused on video games might want to include X accounts of notable video game critics or commentators, he said. X executives had not shared any plans for NSFW communities at that time.

If to content

Alongside the announcement that community admins could now label themselves as including adult content, why you are not eligible to join a given community. as well as temporary and permanent bans for spammers; tools to sort publications by trends, most recent and most popular; a Media tab for Communities on Android; and much more, including a series of bug fixes and minor improvements.

The list of what’s in store for communities was also quite long, noting that users will soon be able to explore top posts and communities across all communities and tools to discover top communities and posts by topic. Communities will also be promoted and recommended to potentially interested users in the For You tab, allowing them to grow their audience. Mods will have access to Community Analytics and can pin posts from multiple members. There will also be support for spam filter levels set by admins, simplified reporting and moderation pages, and audio spaces in communities, among others.

The post suggests a new user interface for posts, and answers could also be on the way.

X did not return a request for comment on an expected arrival time for any of the items listed as coming “soon.”