Hey Twitter, The Search Query Was For Fisting, Not Fishing!

TWITTERLAND—It didn't take long for people to notice that something was amiss this weekend over at Twitter for anyone using "Top Tweets" to look for sex-related content, only to have the queries blocked or redirected to unrelated topics. Even this afternoon, if you look for "fisting," they redirect you to results for "fishing" before grudgingly obeying your request. It's true and it's been like that since at least yesterday, when Erosblog's Bacchus noted, "#Spanking still returns 'top' results (I guess the thinking is that we don’t want to stop parents from talking about how precisely they should go about beating their precious darlings) as does #enemas (don’t want to harsh that trendy coffee-enema health craze!). #Fisting, though, gets the double-deathkiss; Twitter first offers you #fishing results, then says it has no top fisting results if you demand to 'Search instead for fisting.'" Bacchus gave his hat-tip to Violet Blue, who had mentioned it in passing the day before, citing an even earlier observation in a Crash Pad Series tweet, and today EroticScribes.com took an updated look at the situation, which it calls "very peculiar." The situation also appears to be fluid, with a cloud of uncertainty about exactly what Twitter is up to, and whether it will stick. Even Bacchus, who consistently mentioned the "blocking" of results for keywords like "#Pussy, #cunt, and #vagina," clarifies, "Let’s be double clear what we mean by 'blocked' here. So far, there are no reports of any killwords being applied to the 'all tweets' search. You can still find this stuff with an extra click. The block is being applied to the 'Top Tweets' functionality, which of course is the default search result presentation." As to the meaning of "Top Tweet," Twitter defines it as: When you search on Twitter.com, you can toggle between “Top”, “All”, and “People you follow” results. Clicking “Top” shows popular Tweets that many other Twitter users have engaged with and thought were useful. We’ve built an algorithm that finds the Tweets that have caught the attention of other users. Top Tweets will refresh automatically and are surfaced for popularly-retweeted subjects based on this algorithm. We do not hand-select Top Tweets. It seems, however, as if they may be "hand-rejecting" some Top Tweets. It should also be noted that Twitter, which very recently added some teeth (hopefully) to an updated "revenge porn" policy, has also recentlly been the subject of an investigation by the UK's Channel 4 into the amount of porn on the network. It concluded that "roughly one in every thousand tweets is a pornographic image."  More on this as it develops.