(Credit: Marcelo Endelli/Getty Images.)
Swifties, rejoice. You can once again search for your favorite singer on X, formerly known as Twitter. Search results for Taylor Swift no longer produce an error message, the Elon Musk-owned company's Head of Business Operations, Joe Benarroch, confirmed to The Wall Street Journal late Monday.
"Search has been re-enabled and we will continue to be vigilant for any attempt to spread this content and will remove it if we find it," Benarroch said.
The social media site initially blocked Swift searches last week, when a flurry of AI-generated, sexually explicit deepfakes of Swift flooded the platform. Some fans responded by attempting to counter-flood X feeds with legitimate images of the singer and also mass-reported one of the accounts posting the deepfakes.
Benarroch previously confirmed that X intentionally blocked users from being able to search Swift's name after the incident.
X has said that it has a "zero-tolerance" policy for such content. The site's quick efforts to curb the Swift deepfakes come just days before a planned US Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on Jan. 31, where social media executives like X CEO Linda Yaccarino, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew are expected to testify to how their platforms are addressing the issue of online child sexual exploitation.
X is among the platforms that previously received a subpoena to attend the hearing.
While Swift is not a minor, X has a "synthetic and manipulated media policy" that bars users from posting "synthetic" or "manipulated" visual content that "may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm." Memes, illustrations, cartoons, and commentary are among the exceptions to the policy, however.
X users can generally post explicit sexual content, though there are some restrictions. In this case, the Swift deepfakes would likely violate X's manipulated media policy as well as its non-consensual nudity policy, the latter of which prohibits users from posting any "intimate" media of another person without their consent.
AI-generated deepfakes of private individuals and celebrities has already become a big issue, with deepfake robocalls imitating President Joe Biden to platforms where users can reportedly offer "bounties" for AI deepfakes they want created.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called the X Swift incident "alarming and terrible" and urged the site to "move fast" on the issue. It also has a role in this, however. After it was revealed that the X Taylor Swift images were made using Microsoft Designer, Microsoft updated the tool to stop people from creating images featuring celebs in sexual situations.
Musk also created an AI company of his own, xAI, back in November to develop generative AI tools like Grok, which is currently in early access.