Twitter's Changing Things Up With A New "Sensitive" Tag And Sponsored Tweets

Posted 07/29/2011 at 10:51am | by Brad Chacos

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Even if you're lucky enough to toil away in an enlightened work places that lets you Tweet away to your heart's content during the day, your boss might not be very understanding if your feed's full of porn links from your potty-minded pals. Your days over hovering over bit.ly links, paralyzed in fear may soon be over. Twitter's rolling out a new tweak to its API that will let you block your friends' linkbombs from even showing up.

"Beginning today you may notice a new boolean field in API responses & streams containing tweets: "possibly_sensitive," Taylor Singletary and the Twitter Platform team announced on its developer blog. "This new field will only surface when a tweet contains a link. The meaning of the field doesn't pertain to the tweet content itself, but instead it is an indicator that the URL contained in the tweet may contain content or media identified as sensitive content

So rather than having to point out a NSFW link manually, you'll be able to tag a post as "sensitive" at some point in the future. Yahoo News reports that you'll be able to choose to block any sensitive-tagged posts from entering your Twitter feed, and if a chucklehead buddy of yours passes along a NSFW link without tagging it, you can tag it yourself and Twitter will review it. It's not censorship; it's all optional.

Twitter's playing around with their posting structure a lot these days. The new sensitive feature comes just days after Twitter announced it was testing out sponsored "Promoted Tweets" on a limited basis. If you're following a brand that's paid for a Promoted Tweet, it will appear near the top of your timeline, MSNBC reports. As crappy as that sounds, it could be worse; you won't see ads from accounts that you aren't following, and you'll be able to banish them forever with one quick mouse click.