Breaking: Changes to X Communities Allow for Adult Content
After early reports surfaced about X’s plans to introduce NSFW adult communities, the social media platform has officially confirmed the addition of an “Adult Content” label that community admins can set to prevent auto-filtering of their content. This comes as X moves towards a more direct embrace of adult content that has long been present on the platform.
Communities on X are smaller, specialized groups with their own feeds outside of the main timeline. Recent changes to these communities provide even more evidence of the earlier tests of NSFW communities observed by researchers and developers.
NSFW (not safe for work) content has always played a significant role on X, which has been a primary platform for sex workers to advertise their services. According to documents obtained by Reuters in 2022, roughly 13% of all posts on X contained NSFW content, including nude photos, explicit videos, and other types of pornography. Additionally, these documents revealed that adult content was one of the fastest-growing genres on the platform, despite a decline in other categories such as news and sports.
New York Intelligencer recently highlighted the rise of spam bots on X, which use links in their profiles or bios to promote NSFW content. These bots often reply to posts with messages like “nudes in bio” or “pics in bio” to attract attention.
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…
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 owner Elon Musk who commented, “Many upgrades to X Communities!”
Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino have promoted Communities as a key to X’s future growth plans. In a transcript acquired by The Verge, Musk explained that the Communities product was experiencing rapid growth and that there was “a lot of work to do to make Communities compelling.” He also shared that X was seeing a large percentage of 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 video game-focused community may want to include the X accounts of notable video game reviewers or commentators.
At the time of this all-hands meeting, there were no plans for NSFW Communities. However, if X is able to make Communities a successful product, it could potentially rival larger forum sites such as Reddit and provide valuable data for Musk’s xAI-run chatbot, Grok, which has exclusive access to X content.
In addition to the ability for Community admins to label their communities as including adult content, X will also be introducing a ban button alongside keep and hide options for reported posts. There will also be more detailed messages explaining why a user is not eligible to join a specific Community, plus temporary and permanent bans for spammers. Other updates include the ability to sort posts by trending, most recent, and most liked; a media tab for Communities on Android; and overall improvements and bug fixes.
The list of upcoming updates for Communities is extensive and also mentions new tools for exploring top posts and communities across all Communities, as well as promoting and recommending Communities to potentially interested users on the For You tab. Community moderators will also have access to analytics and the ability to pin multiple members’ posts. Additionally, there will be support for spam filter levels set by admins, simplified reporting and moderating pages, and the introduction of audio Spaces in Communities.
Based on the article, it appears that there may also be a new user interface in the works for posts and replies on X. As of now, there is no estimated time for when these updates will be released.
X did not respond to requests for comment about the timeline for these updates.
