Twitter Accidentally Trends Horrifyingly Explicit Sexual Terms

On Thursday morning, Twitter’s top trending hashtags included some extremely sexually charged words and phrases.

These hashtags included “#creampie” and “#forcedanal,” Motherboard reports. While the social media platform says it’s investigating what went wrong, the X-rated trends are a particularly damning indictment against putting content moderation in the hands of algorithms and machines.

Damage Control

A Twitter spokesperson told Motherboard that the explicit hashtags “should not have appeared in trends” then shared a link to Twitter’s policy of preventing “adult/graphic references” from trending.

Also banned from trends, Motherboard reports, are posts that contain profanity, a broad spectrum of hate speech, and anything that violates other Twitter rules.

But apparently, somehow, literal sex terms and a reference to apparent sexual assault managed to slip past moderation.