X releases first transparency report since Elon Musk took over the platform – News

X Corp. released its first transparency report today under its owner Elon Musk, detailing the platform’s arguably surprising moderation strategies.

The last time such a report was issued was back in 2021, when X was Twitter Inc., and being a user of the website wasn’t quite so much a politically polarizing issue. Since Musk’s acquisition of the company, he’s said a lot about free speech, so it’s interesting to see for the first time just what X’s moderation team has been doing.

The short answer is: quite a lot. The report states that in the first six months of 2024, about 5.3 million accounts were suspended, compared with the 1.6 million accounts that were hit with a suspension in the first half of 2022. The new X “removed or labeled” more than 10.6 million accounts for violating policy, about 5 million of which were flagged under the platform’s “hateful conduct” policy. Some 2,361 profiles were hit with a ban.

This seems to contradict the theory that Musk’s X is moderation lite. The report says it caught 370,588 posts deemed as child exploitation, reporting them to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. More than 2 million accounts were found to be actively engaging with child sexual abuse material, or CSAM.

In 2021, Twitter reported just 86,000 cases to NCMEC. That went up to 98,000 in 2022, then a huge increase to 870,000 in 2023. X has said the reason for the jump in numbers is that it updated its CSAM policies.

“Our policies and enforcement principles are grounded in human rights, and we have been taking an extensive and holistic approach towards freedom of expression by investing in developing a broader range of remediations, with a particular focus on education, rehabilitation, and deterrence,” the report explains. “These beliefs are the foundation of ‘Freedom of Speech, not Freedom of Reach’ — our enforcement philosophy, which means we restrict the reach of posts, only where appropriate, to make the content less discoverable as an alternative to removal.”

A perhaps more controversial matter is government requests, something that before Musk’s takeover seemed very active — later exposed under what became known as the Twitter Files. The old Twitter fielded 11,460 government requests for information from 67 countries in the first half of 2022, complying with 40.2% of them. In 2024, X fielded 18,000 such requests for information and 72,000 requests for content to be taken down, coming from various governments. X said it disclosed information in 52% of cases and complied with about 70% of the takedown requests.

Photo: Unsplash