• X, formerly Twitter, has started telling users how their accounts are labelled behind the scenes.
• These labels give staffers insight into how an account behaves and allows an account’s reach to be limited based on what labels are assigned.
• However, many users have said that this information hasn’t been shared with them yet.

Shortly after taking ownership of Twitter, Elon Musk decided to publish what he dubbed “The Twitter Files”. This took the form of Musk sharing some insider information about the platform with journalists he hand-picked and nobody else.

Not much, if anything, came from those revelations as the “Twitter Files” really didn’t show much. The reports showcased US government agencies in contact with Twitter staffers, why the decision to ban former US President Donald Trump came about and more. Much to his dismay though, the smoking gun Musk tried to show everybody was more of an empty water pistol.

However, there was one important detail that these files revealed, account labels. These labels were and still are used by Twitter, now X, to classify users behind the scenes. These aren’t like the Government-affiliated account labels or the self-imposed labels users can add to their bio.

As Bari Weiss highlighted two years ago, labels can include whether an account’s reach is limited, whether the owner operates multiple accounts, and more. These labels gave Twitter a way to limit the reach of accounts that may be spreading hate, misinformation or infringing content without outright banning them.

For users, however, knowing what labels have been applied to your account has been impossible. On Wednesday, X announced that it has been working to give users insight into which labels are applied to their account.

“Over the last couple of months, we started giving you more transparency on labels we may apply to your account that impact how X treats your content,” X’s Safety team writes.

“Our goal is to notify you every time a product label is applied to your account. So far, we’ve notified around 16M X users. We also allow X Premium accounts to submit feedback on the label that we’ll use to improve our product features,” it continued.

We’re yet to see any message about these account labels but that could be because we’re not courting controversy with every tweet. We’re not the only ones though as several users have asked the Safety team where they can find their labels.

Of course, X could simply be lagging behind when it comes to messaging users. If the Safety team has only contacted 16 million users, that’s a drop in the ocean if X does indeed boast half a billion users as Musk claims without any data to back it up.

A few users have lauded Musk for bringing transparency to X with this move but many more, including Premium users are still searching for these labels.

It’s not clear whether Premium users can have labels removed from their account as the Safety team appears to only be gathering feedback on the labels applied to an account.

We’re fully in support of this information being made known to users and we’d argue that it’s a great move that may influence people to be less incendiary in their interactions on the platform.

Now if X could do something to address low-effort engagement bait beyond Community Notes, that’d be great.