A day after researchers unveiled X’s plans to test NSFW adult communities on the platform formerly known as Twitter, the company confirmed that community administrators can now set a “Mature Content” tag in their settings to avoid automatically filtering the content of their communities. Otherwise, all NSFW content will soon be filtered to X’s Communities by default. Communities are smaller groups of X with their own streams outside of the main timeline.
The changes appear to confirm previous tests of NSFW communities identified by various researchers and reverse engineers, and point to a social network that will now more readily 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 prime advertising space for sex workers, as well as hosting a large number of bots and spam focused on adult content. According internal documents obtained by Reuters in 2022, about 13% of all Twitter posts included NSFW content, including nude and inappropriate photos, videos, and other pornography. In addition, the documents showed that adult content was one of the fastest-growing genres on the platform, even as news and sports were declining.
The New York Intelligencer also recently provided details the rise of spam bots on the service now known as X, which promoted NSFW content with links to their profiles or bios, prompting them to regularly reply to posts with messages like “nude on bio”, “photos on bio” and other more explicit terms .
Now included in a long list of updates in the X Communities is the confirmation that NSFW-focused communities will be allowed to self-identify as such so that their content is not automatically filtered as in other Communities.
The changes, posted on X by an engineer, were reposted by Musk, who commented “Lots of upgrades in X Communities!”
Communities are something owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino promoted during an all-hands event last fall as key to X’s growth plans.
According to a transcript obtained by The Verge, Musk explained the Communities product was growing rapidly but “there is a lot of work to be done to make Communities attractive”. He also shared that X was seeing “rapid percentage growth” in Communities and had added new features, such as the ability to include any X account’s feed in the Community feed. For example, a community focused on video games might want to include X accounts of notable video game reviewers or commentators, he said. X executives had not shared any plans for NSFW Communities at the time.
If X was able to make Communities a successful product, it could potentially serve as a competitor to larger forum sites like Reddit and host training data for Musk’s xAI-powered Grok chatbot, which has exclusive access to X content.
In addition to the news that community managers could now flag themselves as featuring adult content, X will also introduce a Ban button next to the Keep and Hide buttons on the Referred Posts page along with more detailed messages that will explain why you are not eligible to join a given Community. plus temporary and permanent bans for spammers. post sorting tools by Trending, Most Recent and Most Liked. a Media tab for Communities on Android. and more, including a number of bug fixes and minor improvements.
The list of what’s ahead for Communities was also quite extensive, noting that users will soon be able to explore top posts and top communities across Communities and tools to discover top communities and posts by topic. Communities will also be promoted and recommended to potential interested users on the For You tab, allowing them to gain more followers. Mods will have access to Community Analytics and will be able to pin posts from multiple members. There will also be support for admin-defined spam filter levels, simplified reporting and moderation pages, and audio gaps in Communities, among other things.
The post suggests a new user interface for posts, and replies may also be on the way.
X did not return requests for comment on an ETA for any of the items listed as “coming soon.”
