A bug on X, previously Twitter, was inflicting quite a few posts over the weekend to be flagged as “Delicate Media,” thwarting the corporate’s personal makes an attempt to make its platform extra approachable to advertisers. Based on the X Security account in a put up, the difficulty has now been mounted and the group is engaged on eradicating the labels from impacted posts.

“Delicate media” is a label X makes use of to indicate content material that others might not want to see, like violence or nudity. X asks its customers who need to repeatedly put up such gadgets, to regulate their media settings to appropriately mark their photographs. As well as, there’s an choice so as to add a one-time delicate content material warning to images and movies throughout X on iOS, Android, and the online. Posts might be marked as nudity, violence, or simply “delicate” to limit viewing behind a blurred content material warning that requires an extra click on or faucet to view the media.

Nonetheless, X customers had been discovering that even innocuous images and media had been being marked as “delicate” — one thing the corporate itself can do, if it opinions reported gadgets after which chooses so as to add the label to the media to guard customers. Within the days earlier than Twitter’s acquisition by Elon Musk, a mixture of automation and human evaluate (members of the corporate’s belief and security group) would act on these studies to make the choice.

On this most up-to-date occasion, the difficulty might have been the work of a spam bot, in accordance with a put up by Musk, which considerably contradicts the X Security announcement.

On Sunday, Musk wrote “An X spam/rip-off bot by accident flagged many respectable accounts at this time. That is being mounted.” An hour later, he reposted the message from the X security group which referred to the difficulty as a bug. The Security group posted in a while Sunday evening that “all impacted posts have been mounted and incorrectly utilized labels eliminated.”

The problem is the most recent misstep at X because it makes an attempt to determine a brand new monetization technique after advertisers fled the service underneath Musk. Talking at an occasion in November, X proprietor Elon Musk informed advertisers to “go f*ck your self,” when questioned about large manufacturers’ resolution to pause promoting on X over considerations about antisemitic content material on the platform. The comapny was later mentioned to be pursuing small-to-medium-sized advertisers within the meantime because it strikes ahead with its technique to roll out AI and peer-to-peer funds in 2024. 

The problem might even have been worsened by X’s workforce reductions, which impacted its belief and security group — the group that usually reviewed accounts for spam and delicate content material.

Bots flagging accounts shouldn’t be the one space the place X has confronted points with elevated spam in latest months. A seek for the phrase, “I’m sorry, I can’t present a response because it goes towards OpenAI’s use case coverage,” on X lately revealed many automated accounts had been masked as common customers and, in reality, lots of them had been paying X Premium customers. Musk had believed that implementing a small payment would assist rid the platform of spam, however this indicated that at the very least some bots had been keen to pay to look human. The corporate additionally admitted final summer time it had a Verified spammer downside when it introduced new DM settings that might transfer messages from Verified customers out of your inbox — one other indication that X’s Verification system was not removing spammers, as hoped.

X has skilled different main bugs since Musk’s takeover, together with a glitch that broke native photographs and hyperlinks in August 2023 and a world outage final month.