X today released its first transparency report since Elon Musk acquired the company (formerly Twitter) in 2022.
Prior to Musk’s acquisition, Twitter released semi-annual transparency reports. These covered much of the same ground as the new X report, providing specific numbers for takedowns, government requests for information, and content removals, as well as data on reported content and cases where content was removed for policy violations. The most recent transparency report available from Twitter covered the second half of 2021 and was 50 pages long. (The X report is shorter, at 15 pages, but government requests are listed elsewhere on the company’s website and are continually updated to stay compliant with various government orders.)
Comparing the 2021 report to the current X Transparency Report is a bit difficult because the way the company measures different things has changed. For example, 11.6 million accounts were reported in 2021. Of those 11.6 million, 4.3 million were “actioned” and 1.3 million were suspended. The new X Report says there were over 224 million reports of both accounts and individual pieces of content, but 5.2 million accounts were suspended as a result.
While some numbers seem consistent across reports (reports of abuse and harassment are somewhat, predictably, high), there are significant differences in other areas. For example, in the 2021 report, accounts reported for hateful content made up nearly half of all reports and 1 million of the 4.3 million accounts on which action was taken. (The report was interactive on the website, but the current PDF no longer allows users to flip through the data for a more detailed breakdown.) In the new X report, the company says it took action on only 2,361 accounts for posting hateful content.
But that could be down to the fact that X’s policies have changed since it was Twitter. Theodora Skædas, a former member of Twitter’s public policy team who helped form the company’s Moderation Research Consortium, said the numbers in the transparency report might look different. For example, the company last year changed its hate speech policy that previously targeted misgendering and deadnaming, and in November 2022 it rolled back its rules on COVID-19 misinformation.
“Certain policies have changed so some content is no longer a violation, so if you’re looking at a change in quality of experience, that might be hard to capture in a transparency report,” she says.
X has also lost users since Musk’s acquisition, further complicating what the platform’s new reality will be. “Could the numbers be lower, given the changes in usage?” she asks.
After taking over the company in October 2022, Musk fired most of the company’s trust and safety staff, as well as the policy staff who write the platform’s rules and ensure they are enforced. Under Musk’s leadership, the company also began charging for its APIs, making it harder for researchers and nonprofits to access X-Data to see what’s really going on on the platform. This may also explain the change between the two reports.
