X, formerly Twitter, may sound like a porn site, but it’s growing more hostile to adult content. Although currently awash in misinformation and extremist hate speech related to the ongoing war between Israeli armed forces and Hamas militants, the platform is apparently focused on keeping nudity out of users’ feeds rather than how it may be fueling violence and geopolitical instability,.
More than a dozen sex workers with NSFW accounts, many of them promoting OnlyFans pages, tell Rolling Stone that in recent days, their engagement has plummeted. Some claim that their handles don’t come up in searches, or have received specific notifications that their reach has been limited.
“My engagement on X has dropped off by a factor between 10x to 20x over the past one or two days,” says Krystal Davis, an adult performer with over 150,000 followers on the site. A photo of herself in a bikini shared on Thursday currently has just 17 likes. “Very noticeable and likely to be very impactful on my earnings,” Davis says, “given so much of my revenue relates to traffic from the platform to others where my content is available.”
Nina Nova, who has more than 10,000 followers on X, has also witnessed a dramatic decrease in activity on her sex work account, and shared a data screenshot that proved it. “In September, my tweets had 1.6 million impressions,” she points out. “According to X analytics, my impressions have gone down 51 percent in the last 28 days, despite no significant change in my marketing and social media strategy.” Rolling Stone independently confirmed that searching Nova’s exact username on X yielded no results.
This week, Nova and others with NSFW accounts on X received a notification with a red flag icon that reads, “We’ve added a label to your account which may impact its reach.” Tapping the notification leads to a longer explanation that begins, “We have found that your account potentially contains sensitive media — such as graphic, violent [sic], nudity, sexual behavior, hateful symbols, or other sensitive content.” The message states that X may cover the users’ posts with a warning. “The reach of your account and its content may also be restricted, such as being excluded from the For You and Following timelines, recommended notifications, trends, and search results.”
Other sex workers, like Lana Ryder, say their engagement has cratered — but that they haven’t been notified about being flagged. Formerly, Ryder says, “media posts would typically get anywhere from 10-100 retweets and 100-1000 likes, 10-50 comments.” But her last picture “got two retweets and 27 likes, which is completely uncommon for me in lingerie. I noticed my engagement completely down for the past month or so but the past few days have been the worst. I never received any notifications about being suppressed.”
Nobody in this line of business is a stranger to shadowbanning, the means by which social media platforms suppress and hide certain content and users, often in secret. Research has shown that sex workers promoting adult content are particularly likely to have their visibility restricted. Those who fail to label their profile or individual posts as “sensitive” may have that material removed or their accounts locked. Still, the latest crackdown feels extreme, they say. “There’s a been pretty wide discrepancy, even taking into account the usual throttling sex worker accounts usually get,” claims OnlyFans performer Bugs Maytrix, who has 103,000 followers on X but is now in what they refer to as “engagement hell.”
A representative for X was not available to comment on the situation, as the company no longer responds to inquiries from journalists, responding only with an automated email message.
The filtering out of nudity by X’s algorithm comes at a time when the site is so clogged with dangerous, violent, and misleading posts about the Israel-Hamas conflict that the European Union has warned it could face penalties for non-compliance with the recently implemented Digital Services Act, which compels tech companies to block or efficiently remove such content. The platform’s owner, Elon Musk, even personally endorsed an antisemitic account to follow for war updates (and later deleted his recommendation).
Meanwhile, a Media Matters report this week found that X was placing ads for the National Football League and Major League Baseball on verified antisemitic and white nationalist accounts with over a million followers combined. Some of these have promoted Holocaust denial and attacked Jews in dehumanizing terms. This follows demands from the NFL last month that X “rectify the issue” of slotting its advertising alongside extremist hate speech.
All this considered, it would look as if Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino have bigger fish to fry than adult performers using X to connect with customers. For the moment, however, sex workers will just have to contend with a sudden banishment from the mainstream, crowded out by hateful propaganda and fake news.