A bug on X, formerly Twitter, caused numerous posts over the weekend to be marked as “Responsive Media,” thwarting the company's own attempts to make its platform more accessible to advertisers. According to X Safety's story in a mailThe issue has now been fixed and the team is working to remove tags from the affected posts.
“Sensitive media” are a tag that X uses to indicate content that others may not wish to see, such as violence or nudity. X asks its users who wish to periodically post such items to adjust their media settings to appropriately mark their images. Additionally, there's an option to add a one-time sensitive content warning to photos and videos in X on iOS, Android, and the web. Posts can be flagged as nudity, violence, or simply “sensitive” to restrict viewing behind a blurry content warning that requires an additional click or tap to view the media.
However, In the days leading up to Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, a combination of automation and human review (members of the company's trusted and security team) would act on these reports to make the decision.
In this most recent event, the problem may have been the work of a spambot, according to a post by Musk, which somewhat contradicts X Safety's announcement.
Sunday, musk wrote “A spam/scam bot X accidentally flagged many legitimate accounts today. “This is being fixed.” An hour later, he reposted the message from the X security team that referred to the issue as a bug. The security team aware Later on Sunday night, “all affected posts were fixed and incorrectly applied tags were removed.”
The problem is X's latest misstep as it tries to come up with a new monetization strategy after advertisers abandoned the service under Musk. At an event in November, X owner Elon Musk told advertisers to “fuck off” when asked about big brands' decision to suspend advertising on X over concerns about anti-Semitic content. on the platform. The company was later said to be pursuing small and medium-sized advertisers in the meantime as it moved forward with its strategy to roll out artificial intelligence and peer-to-peer payments in 2024.
The problem could also have been made worse by X's staff reductions, which affected its trust and security team, the team that normally reviewed accounts for spam and sensitive content.
Bots flagging accounts is not the only area where X has faced problems with an increase in spam in recent months. A search for the phrase “Sorry, I can't give an answer because it's against OpenAI's use case policy” on to X. Premium users. Musk had believed that implementing a small fee would help eliminate spam from the platform, but this indicated that at least some bots were willing to pay to appear human. The company also admitted last summer that it had a problem with verified spammers when it announced new DM settings that would remove verified users' messages from their inbox, another indication that X's verification system was not weeding out spammers. spammers, as expected.
X has experienced other major bugs since Musk's acquisition, including a bug that broke native images and links in August 2023 and a global outage last month.
