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X has issued its first transparency report under Elon Musk’s leadership, revealing the significant increase in account suspensions.
The report covers January to June 2024 and outlines the content moderation practices that have led to the removal of millions of posts and accounts.
When X was still Twitter, from 2012 it released biannual reports on data requests, copyright notices, user violations, and suspensions, usually over 50 pages. However, this practice ceased in 2022 during Musk’s acquisition of the platform.
Now, the company has released a new 15-page transparency report, shorter than previous ones, amid declining advertising revenue and criticism over offensive content and hate speech.
According to its previous reports, Twitter suspended nearly 873,000 accounts in the last half of 2019, with that number increasing to about 1.3 million in the latter half of 2021. However, under Musk’s leadership X suspended 5.3 million accounts in the first half of 2024, more than four times the number suspended by Twitter during similar periods. The primary reason for the suspensions was the spread of content related to child sexual exploitation, accounting for nearly 2.8 million of the banned accounts.
The site received over 224 million user complaints in the first half of the year, with nearly 82 million classified as abuse and harassment, accounting for 36.5% of total reports. Hateful conduct followed with nearly 67 million reports, while violent content had 40 million.
X removed 10.6 million posts, including almost five million flagged as “hateful” content, which researchers say has increased under Elon Musk.
The platform reported more than 18,737 government requests for information in the first half of the year, including 7,872 from the European Union and 3,329 from the US government. Most removal demands, as in previous years, originated from a few countries, including Japan, South Korea, and Turkey, which submitted thousands of requests and often succeeded in persuading Musk’s X to remove or restrict content.
last observation about the X Transparency report, compliance with external requests to restrict accounts or content is way up, 71% compliance with state removal requests up from 54% in the last report, and 60% compliance with copyright requests up from 33% pic.twitter.com/Gr9coUrLjD
— Colin Fraser (@colin_fraser) September 27, 2024
Despite his criticism of government attempts to “censor” content, Musk has frequently yielded to demands for stricter moderation, leading to even greater compliance since his takeover. For instance, after months of resisting a Brazilian Supreme Court order to remove accounts deemed a threat to democracy, X complied last week following fines and a nationwide ban.
