Last month when you searched for “marijuana”, “cannabis”, “weed” or other drug-related words on Twitter, bizarrely no results would show up. However, Twitter has now taken these terms off the “sensitive” list, following a backlash and a petition.
The petition on change.org took issue with the “sensitive content” filter that was automatically turned on for many users, meaning that you’d get no results for terms that Twitter has deemed “sensitive”, according to US News.
This followed a safety update the company put into place on March 1, and it wasn’t just drug-related searches that came up blank. Terms like “jerk”, “balls” and “sexual health” were also deemed sensitive, whereas “opioids” and “amphetamines” were allowed, says US News.
.@Twitter is censoring real-time results for "cannabis," but not for sketchy businesses purporting to sell opioids without a prescription pic.twitter.com/EiEEVFB3es
— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) March 26, 2017
The petition says: “Censoring marijuana-related searches prevents serious people from communicating about one of the most prominent policy issues of our time.”It argues that Twitter allows activists to spread information about important policy issues, journalists to research stories and keep elected officials up to date with what their constituents care about.Twitter soon reversed its decision to have words like “weed” on the censored list after facing some serious backlash. It’s unknown whether the change.org petition is directly responsible for this, but it must have helped put pressure on the company.
