X Confirm NSFW Community Program

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 admins can now set an “adult content” label in their settings to avoid automatic filtering of community content. Otherwise, all NSFW content will soon be filtered in the X community by default. Communities are smaller groups of X that have their own feed outside of the main timeline.

The changes appear to confirm earlier tests by the NSFW community that various researchers and reverse engineers have uncovered, and suggest that the social network will now more directly embrace adult content that has always been on the platform.

NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content plays a big role on X, which has been a major advertising venue for sex workers and home to a large number of adult content-focused bots and spam. According to internal documents obtained by Reuters in 2022, about 13% of Twitter posts contain NSFW content, such as nude and explicit photos, videos and other sexual content. What’s more, the documents show that while news and sports content is declining, adult content is one of the fastest-growing genres on the platform.

The New York Intelligencer also recently detailed the rise of spam bots on a service now known as ”, “pictures” and other messages. in living things” and other more explicit terms.

Now, included in A long list of updates from the X community Confirmed NSFW-centric communities will be allowed to designate themselves to avoid having their content automatically filtered like other communities.

These changes were posted on X by engineers and forwarded by Musk, who commented, “Lots of upgrades in the X community!”

Last fall, company owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino emphasized during an all-hands meeting that community is key to X’s future growth plans.

According to a transcript obtained by The Verge, Musk explained that the community product is growing rapidly, but “there’s still a lot of work to be done to make the community more attractive.” He also said that X sees ” Rapid percentage growth” and new features are being added all the time, such as the ability to include any X account’s feed in the community feed. For example, a video game-centric community might want to include the X account of a famous video game critic or reviewer, he said. X executives had not shared any NSFW community plans at the time.

If X can make communities a successful product, it could become a competitor to large forum sites like Reddit and provide a host of training data for Grok, a chatbot run by Musk’s xAI that has exclusive access to X content.

In addition to community moderators now being able to flag themselves for messages containing adult content, More detailed messaging on ineligibility to join specific communities, plus temporary and permanent bans on spammers; Tools to sort posts by trending, latest and most liked; Communities media tab on Android; and more, Includes a series of bug fixes and minor improvements.

The future list of communities is also pretty extensive, noting that users will soon be able to explore popular posts and popular communities across all communities, as well as use tools to discover popular communities and posts by topic. The community will also promote and recommend to potentially interested users on the “Recommended for You” tab, allowing them to grow more followers. Administrators will have access to community analytics and the ability to pin posts from multiple members. Among other things, there will be support for administrator-set spam filter levels, streamlined reporting and moderation pages, and audio spaces in communities.

The post hints that a new user interface for posts and replies may be coming soon as well.

X did not respond to a request for comment on the estimated arrival time for any of the items listed as “coming soon.”