Azur Lane forced to censor illustrations on X, publisher says X’s standards are a “mystery”
The official Japanese X (formerly Twitter) account for Azur Lane announced on May 24 that they would likely be deleting six of their posts from the platform in response to requirements imposed by X’s management. Since then, all mentioned posts have been deleted and some have been reposted with censorship. However, this seems to only apply to the Japanese account, as opposed to the global account. Japanese management has commented that X’s latest standards are “a mystery.”
The recent standards are a mystery, so there is a possibility of the content being re-posted.
The posts in question included character CGs, four-panel comics and short clips that featured revealing costumes, nudity (although not explicit), depictions of jiggling breasts and similar. It seems that X’s management judged this content to be in need of regulation. The specific content of the request received by the Azur Lane account is unknown, and it appears that even the recipients themselves were not properly informed on what exactly the posts were violating.
In May 2024, X introduced a new guideline regarding Adult Content. This new guideline does not appear to change the platform’s previous definition of Adult Content drastically, and it maintains a similar attitude about what is allowed (“You may share consensually produced and distributed adult nudity or sexual behavior, provided it’s properly labeled and not prominently displayed”). However, one change to note is that the new guideline makes sure to list “AI-generated, photographic or animated content such as cartoons, hentai, or anime” as subject to being treated as Adult Content.
As all six posts the Azur Lane X account was requested to address were posted after May 21, we could be seeing the new guideline at work. However, the North American account seems to be unaffected at the time of writing, and users are expressing confusion at the 2D gacha game being censored despite the amount of explicit pornography regularly seen all over X.
For the time being, the Japanese Azur Lane account has addressed the issue by reposting the offending CGs with “censorship.” This consists of airbrushed white light and mist covering up more revealing parts of illustrations. Seen below is the same character illustration posted with censorship by the Japanese X account and without censorship by the global account:
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This kind of hypocrisy and censorship is annoying overall due to the fact it is very inconsistent and there is a clear bias against stylized and anime looking characters than that of any of the pornographic and lewd content in the 3D form across social media. Sometimes it effects the JP account, other times the NA account as well. For X they need to set guidelines that are not selective but universal and holistic.