Just one day following the revelation by researchers of X’s trials for NSFW adult communities on the site previously called Twitter, the firm acknowledged that Community administrators now have the option to mark their space with an “Adult Content” tag in their settings. This move is to prevent the automatic filtering of their community’s content. In the absence of such a setting, all NSFW materials will soon be filtered by default throughout X’s Communities. Communities on X are defined as smaller groups possessing their own unique feeds separate from the main timeline.
These developments seem to verify the initial sightings of NSFW community experiments by several researchers and reverse engineers, indicating a shift towards a more open acceptance of adult content which has long been part of the platform’s landscape.
NSFW content, which is typically not suitable for work environments, plays a significant role on X. The platform has served as a key promotional tool for sex workers and has been inundated with a considerable volume of adult content through bots and spam. Revealed through internal documents accessed by Reuters in 2022, about 13% of all posts on Twitter contained NSFW material, including nudity and explicit imagery, videos, and other forms of pornography. Additionally, these documents showed that adult content was among the fastest-growing categories on the platform, even while interest in news and sports appeared to wane.
The New York Intelligencer also highlighted the proliferation of spam bots on what is now called X, promoting NSFW content through links in their profiles, or bios. These bots often respond to posts with comments like “nudes in bio,” “pics in bio,” among other explicit phrases.
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
Now included in a long list of updates to X’s Communities is the confirmation that NSFW-focused communities will be allowed to designate themselves as such to keep from having their content filtered automatically, as in other Communities.
The changes, posted on X by an engineer, were reshared by Musk, who commented, “Many upgrades to X Communities!”
Communities are something that owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino promoted during an all-hands last fall as being key to X’s growth plans.
According to a transcript acquired by The Verge, Musk explained that the Communities product was growing fast but “there’s a lot of work to do to make Communities compelling.” He also shared that X was seeing “rapid percentage growth” in Communities, and had been adding new features, like the ability to include any X account’s feed in the Community feed. For example, a video game-focused community may want to include the X accounts of notable video game reviewers or commentators, he said. The X executives had not shared any plans for NSFW Communities at that time.
If X were 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-run chatbot Grok, which has exclusive access to X content.
Alongside the news that Community admins could now label themselves as including adult content, X will also introduce a Ban button alongside Keep and Hide buttons on the Reported posts page along with more detailed messages explaining why you’re not eligible to join a given Community, plus 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 more, including a range of bug fixes and minor improvements.
The list of what’s ahead for Communities was fairly extensive, too, noting that users will soon be able to explore top posts and top 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 on the For You tab, allowing them to grow more of a following. Mods will have access to Community Analytics and will be able to pin multiple members’ posts. There will also be support for spam filter levels set by admins, simplified reporting and moderation pages, and audio Spaces in Communities, among other things.
The post suggests a new user interface for posts, and replies may be on the way, too.
X did not return requests for comment about an ETA for any of the items listed as coming “soon.”
