X will now tell users when governments force limits on their posts

What changed

X now informs users when their posts have been "shadowbanned" — shown to fewer people — because the platform is complying with local laws. According to TechCrunch, the company announced the change on Monday as an expansion of Under the Hood, an existing transparency tool that lets users see whether labels had been applied to their account or posts in ways that affected visibility.

The update goes further than labeling. It also flags cases where posts were downranked because of government-required content filtering, and the downloadable data now identifies which specific posts were withheld in a given country following a legal demand, along with which country made the request.

How Under the Hood works

TechCrunch notes that X first rolled out Under the Hood in August. The option, found in the X app's settings, is available to anyone who has posted at least ten times during the month, and it produces aggregate statistics as a JSON file. Non-technical users can drop the file into an AI chatbot to get a plain-language explanation of what it contains.

That per-account, per-post granularity is unusual. Most companies that disclose government requests do so only in aggregate form through periodic transparency reports, rather than telling individual users directly that their content was suppressed or withheld.

Why governments ask for limits

Government takedown and filtering demands cover a wide range of justifications, TechCrunch reports, from hate speech and terrorism-related laws to election-period rules. Free-expression groups and other critics argue that some governments exploit these same legal mechanisms to silence political dissent, which makes knowing who requested a restriction — and under what authority — significant for anyone watching online speech.

Part of a broader transparency push

The change follows other openness efforts at X. The company has open-sourced its For You feed algorithm, which decides what appears in users' main timelines, and has expanded the open-sourced portions of its codebase with more detail on model configuration, filtering and the core ranking system. According to TechCrunch, the published code now includes the parameters used to weight different ranking signals — the details that determine which posts actually get displayed. X vice president of product Keith Coleman said at the time that the release was "the kind of thing that I think people will be fairly shocked that we are releasing."

Why it matters

For years, users have accused X, and Twitter before it, of shadowbanning them with no way to prove or disprove it, because label and downranking data was never exposed to the people it affected. This feature turns a vague grievance into a checkable fact: affected users can now see whether a drop in reach came from X's own moderation or from a government legal demand — and in the latter case, which country was behind it.

That said, the tool is transparency about compliance, not a challenge to it. X will still restrict content when laws require it to; it is simply telling users who asked. Whether that level of disclosure pressures governments to justify their demands, or merely relocates the secrecy from the platform to the state, remains to be seen.