'Taylor Swift' Can't Be Searched on X as Chiefs Game Begins

Singer Taylor Swift cheered on boyfriend Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday as they took on the Baltimore Ravens in the AFC Championship Game, but fans hoping to find footage of her on X, formerly Twitter, needed some workarounds.

After pornographic, AI-generated photos of Swift circulated on social media last week, searches for "Taylor Swift" on X were met with a message declaring that "something went wrong" with an option to retry the search. A second pop-up reassured the searcher that while something went wrong, "don't fret—it's not your fault."

The deepfake photos of Swift were also posted to Instagram, Facebook and Reddit.

X told CNN in a statement on Saturday that "this is a temporary action and done with an abundance of caution as we prioritize safety on this issue."

Newsweek reached out to the social media site by email outside of regular business hours.

Searches for "Taylor" and "Swift" on their own successfully found results for the pop star, which included a wild celebration in her luxury box suite following Kelce's impressive touchdown catch in the first quarter.

Swift was also shown on CBS following Isiah Pacheco's rushing touchdown in the second quarter, which came up in searches as well. Later in the second quarter, the network showed her as it advertised its upcoming coverage of The Grammys. However, Swift appeared less than pleased to be on camera when people around her seemed to notice that they were on TV.

Experts in AI technology told Newsweek last week that the sudden proliferation of AI-generated porn presents a legal and ethical problem going forward for sites like X. Siwei Lyu, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Buffalo, cited a "defamation effect."

"If these are used targeting individuals (known as revenge pornography) they can also cause tremendous psychological trauma to the victims (almost all victims of revenge pornography are female)," Lyu told Newsweek. "I think the solution lies in (1) technology for detecting and attributing such deepfake images; (2) laws that protect individuals from unauthorized use of their imagery or voice to make deepfake pornography."

Other experts, meanwhile, told Newsweek that Swift could have legal options.

"Legal liability could potentially attach to the original publisher and every re-publisher of the images," David Gelman, a criminal law attorney at Gelman Law in New Jersey, previously told Newsweek. "If there is evidence that X or any other social network knew, or had reason to know, about the images and chose not to remove them as quickly as practicable, that is a factor that would be considered by a court."

According to The Verge, one of the AI images took more than 17 hours to be removed. At various times, the images could be seen in replies to popular posts about Swift.

The lack of full-name searches for Swift didn't stop her from trending on the platform during the game. Late in the first half, the word "Swift" was listed with 182K posts in the "What's happening" tab on X as fans debated the coverage of her.

"I really don't want to see Taylor Swift during the game tomorrow. I do not care that your kid will now ask you questions about football because they show her," X user @QuincyAvery wrote.

"One of the funniest things about this NFL season is truly a bunch of dudes throwing tantrums over the camera cutting to Taylor Swift every now and then. You're talking about NFL games that have a million commercials for like 15 minutes of game action, but this is the line," user @_Zeets wrote, quoting @QuincyAvery's post.