Twitter is perhaps one of the last social networks to allow adult content to be posted freely. Mark your profile as containing “sensitive images” and don’t make your header or profile pic nude, and you’re good to go! Until recently.

It appears that Twitter is censoring porn in its searches. If you search for the word “porn”, there are no Top Tweets displayed in the results; the same goes for some other “dirty words” as well.

Top Tweets are important because they show you tweets that others have engaged with, via retweets, replies, and favourites. Viewing popular tweets is useful if you’re monitoring conversations on certain keywords, or networking, or hey, just looking for some popular porn on Twitter.

How are Top Tweets selected? Twitter Support says:

“We’ve built an algorithm that finds the Tweets that have caught the attention of other users. Top Tweets will refresh automatically and are surfaced for popularly-retweeted subjects based on this algorithm.”

Top Tweets are the default display when you search, and now it displays no results for porn-related keywords. You can still toggle the search page to show All Tweets, but this is sometimes filled with spam and bots. It’s much more useful to be able to see top tweets that others have deemed useful.

This discovery was mentioned in a blog post by Violet Blue; a tweet from @CrashPadSeries on March 14 seems to be the earliest anyone noticed the censorship:

Anyone else notice that Twitter is starting to restrict the (top) search results for ‘porn’ keywords? Cc @violetblue pic.twitter.com/7uMa0ktShH

— Crash Pad Series (@CrashPadSeries) March 15, 2015

What else has made the blacklist? @VioletBlue and her followers have compiled this list so far:

• Phonesex
• Bondage
• Revenge Porn (or, as far as I’ve seen, anything including the word porn – ethical porn, independent porn…)
• BBW
• Femdom (also includes Ebony Femdom)

@ErosBlogBacchus did some exploring to expand the list:

• Buttfucking
• Rimming
• Fisting
• Pornocalypse (ironically)
• Vagina
• Pussy
• Cunt

As noted in his blog post “Pornocalypse Comes To Twitter”, a search for “Fisting” will redirect you to “Fishing”. If you click “search instead for Fisting”, you’ll get no Top Tweets results. Interestingly enough, Penis and Dick aren’t being censored. Yet. I’m not sure who made the decision to censor certain anatomy and leave out others.

Some other words I’ve found to be on the blacklist:

• Booty
• Ass (AssWednesday will likely be added)
• BootyShaking
• Masturbation, MasturbationMonday
• FingerFuck, Fuck, MotherFucker
• Pornstar
• Fetish
• FootFetish
• SmallTits, Tits, TittyTuesday
• Boobs (Natural Boobs, Big Boobs, Fake Boobs) – just one “boob” seems to be okay so far though
• Shit
• Piss (this one was on the list but seems to be displaying fine for me now; maybe it was deemed “safe”)
• Cock, CockSucker
• Orgasm, RuinedOrgasm, OrgasmDenial, OrgasmControl

If you find any more “dirty words” that don’t display any Top Tweets in Twitter’s search results, let me know so I can add them here and keep the list updated.

As I said, the search terms do still work – you can toggle your search to display All Tweets rather than just Top Tweets. If someone is searching Twitter for “FootFetish”, they’ll probably go the extra step of clicking one more button. However, All Tweets are sorted by most recent, unlike Top Tweets which displays the most popular. The results you get in All Tweets might not be completely relevant or might be spam, and your own tagged tweets are likely to be buried quickly.

The reason this change is so concerning is that it’s not something Twitter has addressed at all (aside from saying they’re cracking down on revenge porn as of March 11). If they’re willing to go the step of removing Top Tweets for certain keywords, that’s probably only the first step they’ll take toward censoring adult content on their site.

The list of words must be an ongoing project, because at the time of writing this article “Booty” was on the blacklist but “Ass” wasn’t until the next morning. So far “camgirl” hasn’t been selected, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they get to that as well.

Update: March 18

A Buzzfeed News article on this issue posted last night quotes a Twitter spokesperson with the following:

“We recently made some changes to improve the algorithm that fetches the most relevant content for Top Tweets in search results. A bug was discovered that caused us to aggressively filter some content from Top Tweets inadvertently. We’re working to correct the issue.”

Oh, of course it was a bug! Does this sound a little trite to anyone else? It seems to be the common excuse when a social site gets a bit too enthusiastic about removing adult content. Apparently they’re working on fixing it though, so you can probably expect your searches for #Tits and #Ass to return to normal soon.