San Francisco, CA – X, formerly known as Twitter, has released itsfirst comprehensive transparency report since Elon Musk’s acquisition, offering new insights into how the platform enforces its rules. The report comes as X seeks to reassure advertisersconcerned about the platform’s content moderation policies.
The report details content removal and account bans for the first half of 2024, revealing amore than threefold increase in account suspensions compared to the previous reporting period. X banned nearly 5.3 million accounts during this time, compared to 1.6 million in the first half of 2022.
In addition toaccount suspensions, X also reported removing or labeling over 10.6 million posts that violated its rules. Nearly half of these actions were taken against posts violating X’s hate speech policy, with the platform taking action on 4.9 million such posts. Posts containing abuse and harassment (2.6 million) and violent content (2.2 million) also accounted for a significant portion of the removals.
While these figures don’t provide a complete picture of the content landscape on X, they do highlight hate speech, abuse, and violent contentas some of the platform’s most pressing issues. These are also areas of concern for many advertisers and civil rights groups since Musk’s acquisition.
X claims that the flagged content represents less than 1% of all posts on the platform. However, the report also reveals a significant increase in this type of contentsince Twitter last shared such data before Musk’s takeover. In the second half of 2021, Twitter reported banning around 1.3 million accounts for violating its terms of service and taking action on approximately 4.3 million accounts.
The new report also provides more detailed information on government requests for informationand content removal than a previous, brief report released in April 2023. X received 18,737 government requests for information, with the majority originating from within the European Union. The company complied with 53% of these requests. X also received 72,703government requests to remove content from its platform, complying with over 70% of those requests. Japan accounted for the majority of these requests (46,648), followed by Turkey (9,364).
The release of this transparency report is a significant step for X, as it seeks toregain the trust of advertisers and users who have expressed concerns about the platform’s content moderation policies under Musk’s leadership. However, the report also raises questions about the effectiveness of X’s content moderation efforts, particularly in light of the significant increase in flagged content.
The report’s findings will likely bescrutinized by both supporters and critics of Musk’s approach to content moderation. It remains to be seen whether the report will be enough to alleviate concerns about the platform’s content environment and whether X can effectively address the challenges it faces in moderating its content.
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