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Twitter Censors Search Terms, Offers No Transparency and Mixed Results
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By Ian Miles Cheong | 1:10 pm, March 28, 2017
https://heatst.com/tech/twitter-censors-search-terms-offers-no-transparency-and-mixed-results/

Twitter has upped its censorship game and is now blocking certain terms from showing up on the platform’s built-in search engine. The added filters are part of the company’s 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.
https://blog.twitter.com/2017/our-latest-update-on-safety

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, it’s enabled by default—and the settings to disable “safe search” are hidden away on the Search page, so you won’t find them with the rest of your account preferences.

Users on the platform were quick to discover how looking up certain terms returned zero results. Examples of prohibited terms include “porn,” “BDSM,” “sex,” and “kink.” Other censored words include “hentai,” and “nsfw”—neither of which show up in the search results. Curiously, racial slurs like the n-word and terms like “jihad” still show up unfiltered.

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https://heatst.com/tech/twitter-censors-search-terms-offers-no-transparency-and-mixed-results/