The day after researchers publicized X's plans to test NSFW adult communities on the platform formerly known as Twitter, the company confirmed that Community admins can now set an "Adult Content" label in their settings to avoid having their communities' content auto-filtered. Otherwise, all NSFW content will soon be filtered across X's Communities by default. Communities are X's smaller groups with feeds outside of the main timeline.

The changes appear to confirm the earlier tests of NSFW communities spotted by various researchers and reverse engineers, so pointing to a social network that will now more directly embrace the adult content that has always been present on the platform.

NSFW (not safe for work) content comprises a huge part on X, which has been one of the advertising venues for sex workers, and also hosts a massive amount of bots and spam concentrating mostly on adult content. Based on internal documents obtained by Reuters in 2022, NSFW content is said to account for around 13% of all posts on Twitter containing nude or explicit photos, videos, and others. Documents further report that adult content happens to be one of the fastest-growing genres of the service even as news and sports decline.

New York Intelligencer recently pointed to the rise in spam bots on what is now X: they posted links in their profiles, or bios, pointing to NSFW content and were sending them out to like comment-quickly with something like "nudes in bio," "pics in bio, and more graphic terms.

Hello, friends! Stay tuned for 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…
It's all part of a long list of updates to X's Communities, which also includes confirmation that communities focused on NSFW content will be allowed to designate themselves as such to avoid having their content filtered automatically, as with other Communities.

Update posted on X by the engineer were reshared by Musk. "Many upgrades to X Communities!", it commented.

Communities are something that owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino have been talking up since an all-hands last fall as being key to X's growth plans.

Said Musk in a transcript obtained by The Verge: "Communities product is growing fast" but "there's a lot of work to do to make Communities compelling." He said X was seeing "rapid percentage growth" in Communities and had added new features, such as the ability to include any X account's feed in the Community feed. He added that for example, a gaming-intensive community might be interested in including the X accounts of notable video game critics or commentators. By that time, however, no statements had been made on the status of the NSFW Communities by the executives.

That is to say that if X can make Communities a "good" product, this should become a strong competitor to larger forum sites, such as Reddit, and it could host training data for Musk's xAI-run chatbot Grok, which has the ability to look at exclusive X content.

In addition to the news that Community admins are now able to self-identify as including adult content, X will also have a Ban button appearing alongside the existing Keep and Hide buttons on the Reported posts page, as well as displaying why you are ineligible for a particular Community, in addition to temporary and permanent bans from spamming; the ability to sort posts within Communities by Trending, Most recent, and Most liked; a dedicated Media tab for Communities on Android; and more. As well as these major features, there's a range of bug fixes and minor improvements.

The list of what's to come for Communities was pretty comprehensive too, noting that users will soon be able to browse 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, letting them grow more of a following. They should be able to pin multiple members' posts to the top of a discussion and see Community Analytics. Admins will be able to set spam filter levels. Reporting and moderation pages should be easier to use; audio Spaces in Communities are also in.

The post suggests a new user interface to posts, replies may be incoming as well.

X did not respond to requests for comment regarding the ETA for any of these items, which were listed as being "soon.".