Elon Musks X is embracing adult content. Heres why. -

Why X is embracing adult content:

Long before Elon Musk took over, Twitter had stood out among major social networks for its tacit tolerance of pornography. This week, the social media platform now called X updated its policies to explicitly permit “consensually produced and distributed adult nudity or sexual behavior,” as long as it’s properly labeled at the time it’s shared.

Those new “Adult Content” labels will appear as a content warning that people have to click to see the post, according to X’s policy. Users who are under 18 or who don’t provide their birth date to X will not be able to view it, and those who don’t want to view sensitive content can adjust their settings.

The move isn’t so much a policy shift as a signal that X sees adult content as a business opportunity.

While X declined to comment on the changes, the company’s Safety account said in an X post on Tuesday that it is in the process of updating and clarifying many of its help pages. “The intent of these updates is not to change our enforcement, but to make our rules clearer for everyone,” the account said.

“Most platforms prefer to maintain fuzzy guidelines for [adult] content or avoid the topic altogether, and X deserves credit for clarifying their policy,” said Nu Wexler, partner at the consultancy Four Corners Public Affairs and a former policy communications official at Twitter, Facebook and Google.

“They still have to increase enforcement against illegal content” like child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual porn, he added. “But this announcement will save them time with policymakers who don’t know that nudity has always been allowed on Twitter and X.” Perhaps more importantly, the new policy signals to adult-content creators that “X is open for business.”

Leaning into adult content could be a way for X to differentiate itself from its more buttoned-down rivals in the battle for creators.

It has traditionally been the only major social media network that allows sex workers and other artists who portray nudity to share their work without censure. Meta, for instance, has taken down sex workers’ accounts when it deems their photos have crossed the line from sensual to sexual. That has made X popular as a billboard for adult-content creators advertising their work elsewhere, such as on the subscription adult-content site OnlyFans.

Social media can be a precarious environment for sex workers and adult-content creators, said Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University who’s working on a book about the creator economy. “I was talking to a content creator who had 4 million subscribers on Instagram, and on any given day, she could be locked out of her account for months. This fundamentally impacts their ability to pursue their careers.”

With social media companies increasingly viewing influencers and creators as the key to growth, X may see an opportunity to court a subset of a group that has been marginalized elsewhere, Duffy said.

The company might also try to monetize adult content directly.

There have been hints in the past that Musk was eyeing paywalled adult videos as a potential revenue stream.

Large adult-entertainment sites see more monthly traffic than Amazon, Netflix or TikTok, one academic analysis found. And that audience is willing to pay: Creators on OnlyFans, for instance, brought in $5.5 billion in 2022.

But getting into the adult-content business would also come with risks. The Verge reported in 2022 that Twitter had been planning a potential OnlyFans competitor, only to scrap it amid concerns about its ability to police child sexual abuse material, which is illegal.

Some sex workers are skeptical.

Since Musk’s takeover, some sex workers have seen their audience numbers stagnate, said adult performer Jenna Starr, who uses a stage name and shares content with almost half a million followers on the site. Her account doesn’t pop up in search results, she said, which she attributes to a “shadow ban.”

Adult performer Lana Smalls, 23, who also uses a pseudonym, said the switch probably won’t create material change for sex workers who rely on the platform to drive traffic toward monetized spaces like OnlyFans or PornHub.

“We’ve always posted porn on Twitter,” she told Tech Brief in a text message. “If they un-shadow-ban us and let [sex workers] monetize on their accounts, that would be a step in the right direction, but considering the past promises X/Twitter made with removing bots and free speech, I don’t expect much to change.”

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The Federal Communications Commission holds an open commission meeting, Thursday at 10:30 a.m.
Washington Post Live hosts an event, “The global cyberthreat landscape in 2024,” Thursday at 12 p.m. The event features the State Department’s top cyber diplomat, Nathaniel C. Fick; former National Security Agency director Gen. Paul M. Nakasone; and former acting national cyber director Kemba Walden.

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