In the present day, X launched the corporate’s first transparency report since Elon Musk purchased the corporate, previously Twitter, in 2022.
Earlier than Musk’s takeover, Twitter would launch transparency experiences each six months.These largely lined the identical floor as the brand new X report, giving particular numbers for takedowns, authorities requests for info, and content material removals, in addition to knowledge about which content material was reported and, in some circumstances, eliminated for violating insurance policies. The final transparency report accessible from Twitter lined the second half of 2021 and was 50 pages lengthy. (X’s is a shorter 15 pages, however requests from governments are additionally listed elsewhere on the corporate’s web site and have been persistently up to date to stay in compliance with numerous authorities orders.)
Evaluating the 2021 report back to the present X transparency report is a bit tough, as the best way the corporate measures various things has modified. For example, in 2021, 11.6 million accounts had been reported. Of this 11.6 million, 4.3 million had been “actioned” and 1.3 million had been suspended. In line with the brand new X report, there have been over 224 million experiences, of each accounts and items of particular person content material, however the end result was 5.2 million accounts being suspended.
Whereas some numbers stay seemingly constant throughout the experiences—experiences of abuse and harassment are, considerably predictably, excessive—in different areas, there’s a stark distinction. For example, within the 2021 report, accounts reported for hateful content material accounted for practically half of all experiences, and 1 million of the 4.3 million accounts actioned. (The experiences was once interactive on the web site; the present PDF now not permits customers to flip by the information for extra granular breakdowns.) Within the new X report, the corporate says it has taken motion on solely 2,361 accounts for posting hateful content material.
However this can be resulting from the truth that X’s insurance policies have modified because it was Twitter, which Theodora Skeadas, a former member of Twitter’s public coverage group who helped put collectively its Moderation Analysis Consortium, says may change the best way the numbers look in a transparency report. For example, final 12 months the corporate modified its insurance policies on hate speech, which beforehand covered misgendering and deadnaming, and rolled back its rules around Covid-19 misinformation in November of 2022.
“As sure insurance policies have been modified, some content material is now not violative. So should you’re modifications within the high quality of expertise, that could be laborious to seize in a transparency report,” she says.
X has additionally lost users since Musk’s takeover, additional complicating what the brand new actuality of the platform may appear like. “For those who account for altering utilization, is it a decrease quantity?” she asks.
After taking up the corporate in October of 2022, Musk fired the majority of the company’s trust and safety staff as well as its policy staff, the individuals who make the platform’s guidelines and guarantee they’re enforced. Below Musk, the company also began charging for its API, making it tougher for researchers and nonprofits to entry X knowledge to see what was actually happening on the platform. This will additionally account for modifications between the 2 experiences.
