In the only report X has published since Musk took over the company, X’s moderation practices have been presented more clearly than ever: geared to a nervous advertising community most worried about toxification.
Dramatic increase in account suspensions
The buzzing report that details account suspensions and content removals for the first six months of 2024 shows that suspensions had more than tripled ever since the company’s last data disclosure. In this 2024 interim period, X suspended nearly 5.3 million accounts, up from 1.6 million in the first half of 2022.
A large amount of content removed or tagged
And just those suspensions are in addition to the 10.6 million posts ‘removed or tagged’ by X for violating the company’s rules by posting or sharing prohibited content. Violations of X’s hateful conduct policy accounted for almost half of the removals and tags (4.9 million actions taken by X), while ‘abuse and harassment’ (2.6 million) and ‘violent content’ (2.2 million) were close behind.
Government requests and removal of content
The new report also details that (i) governments issued X 18,737 requests for content data, the majority of which came from the EU and with a disclosure rate of 53 per cent; and (ii) governments sent X 72,703 requests to remove content, and claims that it complied with just over 70 per cent of these requests, with Japan (46,648) and Turkey (9,364) responsible for the majority of these requests.
Notwithstanding these figures, X asserts that rule-breaking content made up, at most, less than 1 per cent of all posts shared on the platform. This report makes one thing clear: despite the platform’s better efforts at moderation, the problem of hate, abuse and violence still poses a massive issue for it.
