Doesn't seem to do anything in Gstreamer 1.0?

The only references I can find for this line are a Pithos bug from 2011 and a couple random Gstreamer 0.1 python scripts here and there on stackoverflow. Nowhere can I find an explanation as to what it actually does or how it works. Needs more testing but it doesn't seem to have any effect either way in Gstreamer 1.0. So I'm removing it to test it for a while.