X Adds Government Requests to Its Under the Hood Visibility Tool

X expanded its Under the Hood transparency tool on September 21, 2026, to disclose when a government request limited a post's visibility. Engadget The update puts legal limits in the same view users use for ranking and label information.

The new notice states when visibility was limited to comply with local laws. It names the country that requested restriction. It lists the posts that drew scrutiny under those laws.

Access remains limited to established accounts. A profile must be active for more than a year with at least ten posts in the previous month. That gate decides who can check this data directly.

X first released Under the Hood in limited testing in August to show For You feed algorithms and labels applied to posts. The For You feed is the system that selects posts for a user's main timeline. The September expansion keeps that function and adds legal restrictions in one place.

In my view, the design choice matters because it goes past general policy language to name a jurisdiction and list posts. For people who operate accounts at scale, that brings diagnostic clarity. A drop in reach can come from ranking, a label, or a country-specific limit, and those causes look alike from the outside. Separating legal restriction from algorithmic treatment lets an owner stop working on the wrong system. Specific posts narrow review to a few items instead of a full timeline audit, and country attribution shows where the limit applies. For trust and safety engineers, that detail supports cleaner triage and clearer user messages. It reduces ambiguity without changing the enforcement decision. The tool does not remove the limit. It makes the limit legible, which helps decisions about what to publish, where to publish it, and how to read analytics afterward.

The broader context here is access to transparency itself. The one-year tenure and recent-activity threshold means newer accounts, infrequent posters, and accounts created for testing or incident response will not see this view. That is a constraint for researchers and for teams managing multiple handles. It frames Under the Hood as account-health infrastructure for persistent users rather than a public inspection endpoint. For platform builders, gating diagnostics by tenure trades abuse resistance for coverage, and that trade will shape who benefits first.