X Expands Under the Hood Tool to Flag Government Post Limits

X said Monday it will tell individual users when their posts or accounts have been downranked or withheld because the company is complying with a government demand, an expansion of a transparency tool that previously kept that information from the people it affected, according to TechCrunch.

What is X changing about content moderation disclosures?

The update expands "Under the Hood," a transparency feature X rolled out in August that lets users see whether labels have been applied to their account or posts. The tool now adds a new category: visibility limits tied to government-required content filtering, TechCrunch reported. Users will be able to see if their posts were downranked, or shown to fewer people, and whether specific posts were withheld entirely in a given country following a legal demand from that country's government.

X's official open-source account described the move as a response to user demand for more insight into moderation decisions. "We've expanded Under The Hood after seeing people's appreciation of more transparency into government-required content filtering," the company said in a post cited by TechCrunch.

How does the Under the Hood tool work?

Any X user who has posted at least 10 times in a given month can download an aggregate report of their account activity as a JSON file, a standard machine-readable data format, through the app's settings, according to TechCrunch. The company has noted that users without technical backgrounds can paste the file into an AI chatbot to have its contents explained in plain language.

Under the expanded version, that same downloadable file will now include which country made a legal request affecting a user's posts, alongside the existing monthly summary of labels applied to an account. The change moves disclosure from the account level down to the level of individual posts, a granularity that had not previously been available to end users, TechCrunch reported.

Why does this matter to X users?

Before the tool existed, users had no direct way to confirm whether their reduced visibility on the platform was the result of a moderation decision, a technical issue, or an unrelated dip in engagement. That gap fueled recurring accusations that X, formerly known as Twitter, was "shadowbanning" accounts without disclosure, according to TechCrunch.

Most major platforms currently disclose government takedown and content-restriction requests only through periodic aggregate transparency reports, which summarize the volume of requests a company receives but do not tell any specific user whether their own content was affected, TechCrunch reported. X's approach breaks from that norm by surfacing the information directly to the individual account holder.

What do critics say about government content demands?

Governments cite a range of legal justifications for content-restriction requests, including hate speech statutes, terrorism-related content rules, and election regulations, according to TechCrunch. Free-expression groups have raised concerns that some governments invoke those same categories of law to suppress political dissent rather than to enforce the stated purpose of the rule, TechCrunch reported. The new disclosure does not resolve that underlying dispute over how such laws are applied, but it does give individual users visibility into which country's demand affected their content, information that was previously unavailable to them.

What other transparency steps has X taken recently?

Monday's expansion follows a series of disclosure efforts at the company. X has open-sourced its "For You" recommendation algorithm, the system that selects posts for users' main feeds, and has broadened efforts to open-source portions of its underlying codebase, according to TechCrunch. That codebase release added detail on model configuration, content filtering, and core ranking mechanics, including the parameters used to weight different signals that determine which posts are shown to users, TechCrunch reported.

What happens next for X's transparency push?

TechCrunch's report did not include a timeline for further expansions of the Under the Hood tool or specify whether X plans to publish aggregate, platform-wide statistics on government content-removal demands alongside the individual-user disclosures. The company has not said whether the country-level attribution feature will be extended to markets where it does not currently operate, or whether it plans further parity in the JSON export for accounts with fewer than 10 monthly posts.