The news was dropped, almost casually, by X engineer Dong Wook Chung in a recent post. Chung hinted that “soon” your X feed might be a lot more filtered, with NSFW content automatically stashed away within Communities. The catch? Admins get to decide whether their Community gets the “Adult” label or not.
X “Communities” themselves aren’t even a Musk invention. Twitter started playing with the concept back in 2021, promising a whole new level of cozy conversation. What Twitter never promised was whether that coziness would get, well, adult-themed. And as Engadget points out, let’s not forget that for a hot minute in 2022, the company was reportedly flirting with the idea of launching an OnlyFans rival. Talk about a change of direction! Those plans were reportedly scrapped due to the looming risk that it would make X’s existing problems with illegal child exploitation material infinitely worse.
To clarify further, Chung did post another statement on the matter, saying “this setting is about making Communities safer for everyone by automatically filtering out NSFW content” and that X will require users to have specified their age in order to search these NSFW communities. However, this entire thing feels like a powder keg with a very short fuse. We’ll have to wait and see what happens once the filter is activated.
