X is blocking Taylor Swift searches... barely
Technology,AI,Taylor Swift,Business,Social Media,X,Twitter,Deepfakes,Arts And Entertainment,Women's Issues,Content Moderation
X has blocked searches for Taylor Swift in reaction to a recent trend of graphic AI fakes of the world-famous recording artist being posted to the site. Right now, if you search “Taylor Swift” or “Taylor Swift AI” on X, formerly Twitter, you may see a “Something went wrong” message. X head of business Joe Benarroch acknowledged the “temporary” measure, meant to “prioritize safety,” according to The Wall Street Journal. But it’s very easy to get around, as we found out when trying some searches after Platformer’s Casey Newton posted about the block yesterday.
Rearranging the words in your search to “Taylor AI Swift” or simply putting quotation marks around Swift’s full name both returned results as of this writing, for example. Even tacking another word onto one of the blocked search terms gets results. Also, images still show up under the Media tab, even for the terms that are otherwise blocked.
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