from Hacker News

Twitter is serving me porn as 'suggested tweets' in my feed

by techterrier on 1/17/23, 9:07 PM with 5 comments

• by anigbrowl on 1/17/23, 10:04 PM

  Really aggravating. I also have noticed a much higher level of porn on Twitter over the last 6 months, and increasing.

  I don't find porn morally objectionable as such, but I don't want porn mixed up with my work or social conversations. It would be easy for Twitter to classify things as 'adult content' (or 'sports' or 'nature' etc...to some extent the Twitter API already does this automatically), and make it easy for people to filter it out or not as they choose.

  I've noticed there are two kinds of Twitter porn. The first is overt by semi-professional models, who are often promoting their Onlyfans account or other paid services, showing something a little erotic and inviting people to pay to see more. They will usually have something 'adult content' or 'no under 18s' in their bio. This seems reasonable and responsible to me - if I see such content by accident, I can quickly understand what it is and move on. The other kind is by perverts, people who just seem to want to expose themselves and will abuse hashtags and the like to get themselves in front of as large an audience as possible, without any secondary purpose. I always report these kinds of people.

• by gabrielsroka on 1/18/23, 6:27 PM

  Also yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34405441

• by verdverm on 1/17/23, 9:10 PM

  I've been getting a lot of content I have no interest in on the For You tab. They seem to be experimenting here and doing a shitty job with their recommendation algo

• by rsynnott on 1/18/23, 11:51 AM

  There's always been quite a lot of porn on Twitter, but until recently Twitter was _very_ good at hiding it away unless you went looking for it; I think a lot of people were unaware that Twitter even _allowed_ porn.

  My theory on this is that Twitter has very effective mechanisms for preventing people seeing stuff that they do not want to see, and that new management has, either deliberately or through incompetence, weakened these or outright switched them off. I've stopped using Twitter now, but through November the sort of content it was showing me changed dramatically. I didn't get porn, but I did get a lot of far-right content, and also a lot of Elon Musk tweets (I had to block him to get this to stop, after 15 years of never feeling the need to block him because I rarely _saw_ him). I rarely used to see this stuff before unless people actually retweeted it.

  Cynically, I suspect that he wanted his tweets in front of more people, and the porn thing is just collateral damage of making the recommendation engine less selective.