Twitter’s New Statuses Are Going Straight to Porn, Because Twitter Is Full of Porn

Twitter’s new “statuses” feature is showing some users a lot more than they expected: a whole lot of porn.

This week, Twitter started publicly testing a new feature that lets some users add a trite little clickable phrase to their tweets. People can choose from over a dozen pre-set statuses to add to their tweet, like “Case of the Mondays'' or “a thread” or “soon.” Statuses appear above a tweet, and theoretically, set the reader up for the vibe of the tweet: a “case of the Mondays” might go along with someone whining about their coffee shop being closed. 

Some people on Twitter are reporting that their experience with the new feature is a little different than expected. When they click on a status—like “living the dream,” for example—they’re faced with a feed full of people fucking.

A few people on Motherboard’s staff tested this, and some got the sexually explicit results of clicking on a status, and some didn’t on the same status. For those who did, the porn was at the top of the feed, little to no scrolling required, and there was a lot of it.

All of the status choices are based on things people commonly say on Twitter. As such, they’re all extremely boring, normie, or cliched, and harken back to a time when that’s what Twitter was for: posting photos of your lunch or some gripe about your commute. It’s also very Facebook-esque, even in the name. Some people see Myspace or Livejournal influences in the feature. It’s just Twitter trying to be all of the above. It’s another feature no one asked for.

Right now, a status is similar to a hashtag in functionality. One might assume that clicking a status might show you other people’s tweets with the same status, but it just acts as a shortcut to a normal site search. When you click it, it directs to search results of that phrase. “Good morning,” then, gets you a bunch of people using the phrase in their tweets—including people posting hole, because explicit content is allowed on Twitter. 

Adult content creators are people just like the rest of Twitter’s population, and they’re tweeting with the same language everyone else uses. Sex workers say “case of the Mondays.” They can have “hot takes” and even “unpopular opinions.” They are definitely “traveling” and “on vacation mode” at times. Using common phrases and relatable, clean language is one way people try to fight against being downranked by the algorithm—which many claim punishes people for posting sexually explicit content, even though Twitter technically allows sexual videos and images in tweets. 

So when you click a cheery “vacation mode” status and are met with a barrage of blowjobs, don’t be so shocked. Twitter is full of porn, because Twitter is, thankfully, one of the last mainstream social platforms that still lets adult content creators use it just like anyone else. 

You can avoid all of this, if you want to, by going to your account settings and un-selecting the box “Display media that may contain sensitive content.” 

Twitter did not immediately provide comment on this feature.