X hits number one in App Store as leaked Drake nude goes viral
X hit the number one slot among free apps on Apple’s App Store Wednesday, just as another celebrity image scandal was going viral on its platform.
The hashtag “drakevideo” was trending as of Wednesday in the US, after a video that users speculated to be the rapper Drake half nude and engaged in a sexual act spread across the service.
The incident comes less than two weeks after X struggled to stop the spread of another salacious celebrity image. In late January, fake, AI-generated explicit images of Taylor Swift circulated on the platform, leading the company to at one point block all searches for the artist’s name.
But the scandals hardly seemed to hurt X in terms of downloads. X owner Elon Musk bragged about the app’s ascension to the top of the App Store list Wednesday, writing, “If I had a dollar for every time the media reported that one of my companies was going to die, I would never need to raise money!”
is now the #1 most downloaded app of any kind! pic.twitter.com/TeqWxcmZfs
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 7, 2024
X is “completely committed to maintaining a safe and respectful environment for all users,” spokesperson Joe Benarroch said in a statement, adding that the company has a “zero-tolerance policy” for the sharing of nonconsensual nude images.
The company has already taken actions on thousands of posts, according to Benarroch, and X is “actively monitoring the situation” to remove new violating posts.
Still, shortly after receiving that statement, The Verge was able to find seven at least day-old posts — some with millions of views — featuring the purported Drake video by searching “Drake” in the video tab and barely scrolling. A publicist for Drake declined to comment.
Musk notably slashed teams responsible for content moderation and safety features on the site shortly after he took over the company in 2022.
Alex Heath contributed reporting.