X Unveils Plans for Adult-Only Communities: Embracing NSFW Content

X Embraces Adult Content with NSFW Community Labels

Confirmation of Earlier Tests

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has confirmed that Community admins can now set an “Adult Content” label in their settings to prevent their communities’ content from being automatically filtered. This change aligns with the earlier tests of NSFW communities observed by various researchers and reverse engineers, signaling X’s move towards directly embracing the adult content that has always been present on the platform.

The Significance of NSFW Content on X

NSFW (not safe for work) content plays a significant role on X, serving as a primary advertising venue for sex workers and attracting a large number of adult content-focused bots and spam. According to internal documents obtained by Reuters in 2022, approximately 13% of all X posts included NSFW content, such as nude and explicit photos, videos, and other pornography. The documents also revealed that adult content was one of the fastest-growing genres on the platform, even as news and sports were declining.

The Rise of Spam Bots

New York Intelligencer recently highlighted the increase in spam bots on X, which promoted NSFW content with links in their profiles or bios. These bots regularly replied to posts with messages like “nudes in bio,” “pics in bio,” and other more explicit terms, contributing to the proliferation of adult content on the platform.

Updates to X’s Communities

Among the numerous updates to X’s Communities, the confirmation that NSFW-focused communities will be allowed to designate themselves as such to avoid automatic content filtering stands out. These changes, posted on X by an engineer and reshared by Elon Musk, who commented,

“Many upgrades to X Communities!”

, underscore the platform’s commitment to supporting adult content.

The Importance of Communities for X’s Growth

During an all-hands meeting last fall, owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino emphasized the significance of Communities for X’s growth plans. Musk explained that the Communities product was growing rapidly but required further work to become truly compelling. He also mentioned that X was experiencing “rapid percentage growth” in Communities and had been introducing new features, such as the ability to include any X account’s feed in the Community feed.

Potential Competition and Training Data

If X succeeds in making Communities a thriving product, it could potentially compete with larger forum sites like Reddit and provide training data for Musk’s xAI-run chatbot Grok, which has exclusive access to X content.

Upcoming Features and Improvements

In addition to the adult content labeling option, X will introduce various features and improvements to Communities, including a Ban button alongside Keep and Hide buttons on the Reported posts page, more detailed messages explaining Community join eligibility, temporary and permanent bans for spammers, sorting options for posts, a Media tab for Communities on Android, and numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements.

The list of upcoming features for Communities is extensive, encompassing the ability to explore top posts and 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, Community Analytics for mods, the ability to pin multiple members’ posts, support for spam filter levels set by admins, simplified reporting and moderation pages, and audio Spaces in Communities, among other things.

A new user interface for posts and replies may also be on the horizon, although X did not provide a specific timeline for the implementation of these upcoming features.