The unconventional move suggests that X, which under billionaire owner Elon Musk has fired 80 percent of the company’s workforce, has resorted to blunt measures to accomplish the kind of content-moderation tasks expected of mainstream social media sites. Musk gutted the website’s “trust and safety” team responsible for moderation after he bought the platform in 2022.
Benarroch did not reply to questions about why X would block all searches rather than just moderate more aggressively and whether the layoffs had hindered X’s ability to police its platform.
By Monday afternoon, searches for Swift’s name remained blocked but slight tweaks returned results, including searching her name in quotation marks or adding a word and putting the phrase in quotes, such as “Taylor Swift AI.” After publication, Musk responded to a post addressing this story by saying, “lol.”
The search block is likely to undermine X’s self-promotion as a place for discussing real-time events. Swift, one of the world’s biggest stars, made headlines Sunday when she kissed boyfriend Travis Kelce after the Kansas City Chiefs star tight end helped his team advance to the Super Bowl.
It also comes as X seeks to portray itself as a responsible company in the days before chief executive Linda Yaccarino is scheduled to testify, alongside other Big Tech leaders, at a high-profile Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday about child sexual exploitation online.
On Friday, X said in a post that it is actively removing all “Non-Consensual Nudity” images and “closely monitoring the situation to ensure that any further violations are immediately addressed.”
On Saturday, Benarroch said the company intends to hire 100 content moderators as part of its plans for a new “Trust and Safety center of excellence” in Austin. He did not say when the center would launch.
Last week, as fake nude images of Swift gained tens of millions of views on the platform, frustrated Swift fans took matters into their own hands — by flooding the site with real images, mass-reporting problematic accounts and posting under viral hashtags such as “Protect Taylor Swift.”
AI-porn images and other “deepfakes” have exploded online due to cheap, easy-to-use tools that can superimpose real faces into explicit videos or create realistic photos. These fakes almost always target women, according to a 2019 study by the research group Sensity AI.
Swift — one of X’s biggest accounts, with 94 million followers — has not posted there since Jan. 15. A representative for Swift did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
No federal laws ban the creation or distribution of deepfakes, though some U.S. states and other countries, such as Britain, have passed their own restrictions.
On Friday, the White House cited the Swift fakes and said the increasing spread of AI-generated images was “alarming,” with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre saying that X and other platforms had “an important role to play in enforcing their own rules to prevent the spread of misinformation and nonconsensual, intimate imagery of real people.”
