Over the weekend, X mistakenly smeared and flagged random images as “sensitive content” — even innocuous nature, book, car, or animal shots.
What I posted and what @X is showing people. So weird… how in the world is this graphic content? @elonmusk? anyone? pic.twitter.com/hpvzMBPwxS
— Josiah Kennealy (@JosiahKennealy) January 21, 2024
As Elon Musk reported today, the problem arose due to a malfunction of the bot, which was actually supposed to block spam or fraudulent content, but instead marked “forbidden” ordinary posts.
An ???? spam/scam bot accidentally flagged many legitimate accounts today. This is being fixed.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2024
X reported that the problem was eventually fixed and all the incorrectly applied labels were removed.
UPDATE: All impacted posts should be fixed and incorrectly applied labels removed.
— Safety (@Safety) January 22, 2024
The current technical glitch is just the latest in a series of problems that have hit the social network in recent months. In December, X faced its biggest outage since Elon Musk’s takeover, with more than 100,000 users complaining that the feed temporarily stopped updating. In August 2023, another outage deleted messages posted before 2014 (including Ellen DeGeneres’ famous selfie from the Oscars, which was the most retweeted on the platform), and in July, after introducing “speed limits”, the site limited the number of views per day.
Since his arrival, Musk has fired about 90% of the staff, which is often associated with an increase in the number of technical problems on the site; it may also be affected by the rebranding of Twitter to X, which involves the launch of a dozen new functions, including paid ones.
