American consumers, fresh off strong holiday spending, are feeling more confident than they have in two years.

The Conference Board, a business research group, said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index rose for the third straight month, to 114.8 in January from 108 in December. January’s reading came in just slightly higher than the 114 that analysts were expecting.

The index, which measures both Americans’ assessment of current economic conditions and their outlook for the next six months, is at its highest level since December of 2021.

Anxiety over the possibility of an economic recession in the next 12 months continued to fade for most Americans.

Americans also stepped up their spending at retailers in December, closing out the holiday shopping season and the year on an upbeat tone and signaling that people remain confident enough to keep spending freely.

Elon Musk’s social media platform X has restored searches for Taylor Swift after temporarily blocking users from seeing some results as deepfake porn images of the singer circulated online.

Searches for the singer’s name on the site Tuesday turned up a list of tweets as normal.

A day earlier, the same search resulted in an error message and a prompt for users to retry their search, which added, “Don’t fret — it’s not your fault.” Users, however, had been able to get around the block by putting quote marks around her name.

Sexually explicit and abusive fake images of Swift began circulating widely last week on X, formerly known as Twitter, making her the most famous victim of a scourge that tech platforms and anti-abuse groups have struggled to fix.