Elon Musk’s X is the latest social network to roll out a feature to label edited images as “manipulated media,” if a post by Elon Musk is to be believed. But the company has not clarified how it will make this determination, or whether it includes images that have been edited using traditional tools, like Adobe’s Photoshop.
So far, the only details on the new feature come from a cryptic X post from Elon Musk saying, “Edited visuals warning,” as he reshares an announcement of a new X feature made by the anonymous X account DogeDesigner. That account is often used as a proxy for introducing new X features, as Musk will repost from it to share news.
Still, details on the new system are thin. DogeDesigner’s post claimed X’s new feature could make it “harder for legacy media groups to spread misleading clips or pictures.” It also claimed the feature is new to X.
Before it was acquired and renamed as X, the company known as Twitter had labeled tweets using manipulated, deceptively altered, or fabricated media as an alternative to removing them. Its policy wasn’t limited to AI but included things like “selected editing or cropping or slowing down or overdubbing, or manipulation of subtitles,” the site integrity head, Yoel Roth, said in 2020.
It’s unclear if X is adopting the same rules or has made any significant changes to tackle AI. Its help documentation currently says there’s a policy against sharing inauthentic media, but it’s rarely enforced, as the recent deepfake debacle of users sharing non-consensual nude images showed. In addition, even the White House now shares manipulated images.
Edited visuals warning https://t.co/0OIz5PvwSz — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 28, 2026
Calling something “manipulated media” or an “AI image” can be nuanced.
Given that X is a playground for political propaganda, both domestically and abroad, some understanding of how the company determines what’s “edited,” or perhaps AI-generated or AI-manipulated, should be documented. In addition, users should know whether or not there’s any sort of dispute process beyond X’s crowdsourced Community Notes.
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As Meta discovered when it introduced AI image labeling in 2024, it’s easy for detection systems to go awry. In its case, Meta was found to be incorrectly tagging real photographs with its “Made with AI” label, even though they had not been created using generative AI.
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