It looks like we won’t be escaping those explicit ‘nudes in bio’ posts anytime soon. This week, X confirmed plans for new not safe for work (NSFW) ‘Communities’ on the platform.
As first spotted by reverse engineers on March 28, Community admins will soon be able to label a Community as NSFW in their settings. This toggle prevents NSFW content from being automatically filtered from these communities’ timelines.
Let’s say the quiet part out loud here. This update makes it a hell of a lot easier for users to curate Communities exclusively tailored towards adult content.
The move, however, could end up being a double-edged sword for adult creators. On the one hand, it’s an explicit endorsement of NSFW content in certain channels. But, by auto-filtering out adult content from other Communities, this move might hurt adult creators’ discoverability on the platform.
Communities, it should be noted, are smaller groups within X with their own independent feeds. Before this feature was introduced, groups still congregated on Twitter through the use of hashtags. However, the Community feature has made it easier than ever for users to connect with other like-minded people.
X’s vast NSFW community is the app’s biggest open secret. In 2022, internal documents obtained by Reuters revealed that 13% of all X’s posts are NSFW. The size and reach of X make it instrumental for adult creators seeking to promote content such as OnlyFans.
But anyone who has spent more than five minutes on the app knows that it has a serious spam and bot problem related to adult content. It’s arguable that X’s more stringent filtering and community separation will tackle this. Or, by opening the floodgates, the problem could become a lot worse.
