Opinion: Twitter should shamelessly copy Reddit's easy-to-use labels for flagging NSFW tweets

It’s not unusual to come across sensitive content (nudity) that is not suitable for work (NSFW) on Twitter. After all, Elon Musk says it’s a free speech platform where everyone can express themselves without the fear of censorship.

But how true is this? Can you really tweet anything without Twitter taking down the post or suppressing its reach so as to minimize the supposed damage the tweet could cause?

This is something several Twitter users have been grappling with over the past few months. Reports of accounts shadowbanned in unclear circumstances have been rampant ever since the turn of the year.

what if you stop showing us the view counts at all, also the “for you” isnt that really necessary, lastly why there are so many people shadowbanned like???
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The exact reason behind these unexplained shadowbans has remained an unsolved puzzle for the past several months. But not anymore, so it seems.

Elon recently lifted the lid when responding to a shadowban concern affecting a popular Twitter account (Libs of TikTok) associated with LGBTQ and left-wing content.

Apparently, people couldn’t find it on Twitter. Not even with a manual search, which prompted the owner to ask the boss for an explanation.

Hi @elonmusk, these are just some of the messages I received in the past week. I’ve been shadowbanned for weeks now. Is there a reason why accounts are still getting throttled like this in Twitter 2.0?

Perhaps for fear of any controversy given his stance as ‘neither left nor right’ wing, Elon was quick to share details of the ban. And apparently, it was because Twitter mistakenly labeled the entire account as NSFW content.

Your account was labeled as NSFW by our dick pic bot on 6/26, because you posted media with nudity from Pride parades. Corrective action is to label the individual posts as NSFW, rather than the whole account. Should be fixed now.
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Depending on which streets you tread on, Twitter can get nasty really quick. There’s plenty of nudity on the site, so it’s quite intriguing the account got flagged for sharing media from a Pride event that is well documented.

Ever since taking over, Elon has been the go-to guy for quick solutions to disturbing Twitter issues. And time to time, he continues to prove effective.

The team at Twitter must be aware Libs of TikTok isn’t the only affected account. As noted earlier, there are ongoing cases of people fighting shadowbans.

Suggesting that a “corrective action is to label the individual posts as NSFW” implies Elon clearly has the solution. And my wish is that Twitter reads a few lines from Reddit’s book on how to implement an NSFW label.

In its current format, the ability to mark media as sensitive isn’t quite useful. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re just finding out the feature exists. Some of my colleagues just did too.

Unlike Reddit where the NSFW label is there right from the start when composing a post, Twitter’s NSFW flag is buried multiple taps deep into the tweet editor.

When composing a tweet with sensitive content, tap on the uploaded media to open the editor. Here, tap on the flag icon to mark your content as either ‘Nudity’, ‘Violence’ or ‘Sensitive’. You can also check two or all options.

When done, tap on ‘Done’ in the top right corner and ‘Save’ in the top right corner once again. From here, the tweet is ready to publish.

Over on Reddit, the NSFW label is present in the composer, so you don’t have to go wandering around to add it to your post. This is perhaps what Twitter should look to emulate.

They don’t have to re-invent the wheel. They only need to make the NSFW flag more prominent and easy to reach when composing a tweet.

Twitter should also back-pedal on tanking the reach of accounts that publish NSFW content as long as they abide by adding the required label to their tweets.

This should encourage those whose reach has been nerfed in the past for posting NSFW content to religiously add the label knowing their impressions won’t be compromised. Those that don’t should square it off with the dic bot.

If the Zuck can copy a significant chunk of an app’s functionality, for sure, Twitter can also get away with copying one of Reddit’s best feature in this regard no?

With such a label on Twitter, Libs of TikTok and many others targeted by the dic pic bot (and similar bots) could have easily labeled the specific post as NSFW before posting it.

This could have in turn prevented the system from flagging the entire account as NSFW. And while the issue has since been addressed, taking a wholistic approach is a better solution to this shadowban problem.

But again, the good thing is that Elon seems aware of the solution to handling individual NSFW posts. Only that we don’t know if he intends to do a better job at improving its visibility. Hopefully, he does.

It will be interesting to see how Twitter goes around this. Meanwhile, feel free to chime in with your thoughts in the comments and poll below.

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