Twitter Censors Search Terms, Offers No Transparency and Mixed … – Heat Street

Twitter has upped its censorship game and is now blocking certain terms from showing up on the platforms built-in search engine. The added filters are part of the companys plans to reduce harassment on the service. Some of these filters were deployed earlier this month when users were given the option to mute certain types of accounts.

As with previous efforts to convert Twitter into a safe space, free from wrongthink and uncomfortable opinions, the company that once branded itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party has offered little transparency on the terms it filters out of its search engine. Furthermore, its enabled by defaultand the settings to disable safe search are hidden away on the Search page, so you wont find them with the rest of your account preferences.

Users on the platform were quick to discover how looking up certain terms returnedzero results. Examples of prohibited terms include porn, BDSM, sex, and kink. Other censored words include hentai, and nsfwneither of which show up in the search results. Curiously, racial slurs like the n-word and terms like jihad still show up unfiltered.

Over the weekend, the terms marijuana and cannabis were also filtered out out the search engine. Butcomplaints may have prompted the platform to uncensor the term, as it now shows up.

The filtering system doesnt even work as its developers intendedsensitive terms are filtered out on the Latest tab, but youll still find some of them in the Top tab. Twitters censorship is confusing and lacks the transparency necessary to be useful to users.

Twitter is well within its rights to implement safety features, but so far, theyve only hurt usability. After all, who uses Twitter search to look for porn?

Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at@stillgray on Twitterand onFacebook.

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Twitter Censors Search Terms, Offers No Transparency and Mixed ... - Heat Street