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Elon Musk’s social media platform released its first transparency report since he bought it in 2022, showing the company is ready and able to comply with government takedown requests.
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Before Wednesday, the company, now called X Corp., had released its last transparency report, which covered the last six months of 2021. That report included information on how the company, then called Twitter, enforced its rules and responded to government requests for information, legal requests to remove content, copyright and trademark notices and more.
According to The Washington Post, which reviewed X’s reports, the website complied with 71% of legal requests to remove content it received in the first half of 2024, up 20% from 2021 and higher than the roughly 30% of requests it complied with in past years.
Many of these requests came from a small number of countries, including Turkey and South Korea, and they were often successful in removing or restricting content.
Turkey, which has strict censorship laws and is led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has fulfilled 68% of Musk’s requests to build a Tesla (TSLA) factory in Turkey. X also fulfilled 73% of requests from South Korea, 79% of requests from Japan, and 80% of requests from the European Union.
This stands in stark contrast to Musk’s public stance as a “free speech absolutist,” especially given his recent high-profile feud with the Brazilian government, but the company’s response is consistent with X’s actions in his first six months as owner.
In April 2023, Rest of World reported that the company had fully complied with 808 of the 971 government requests it received between October 2022 and April 2023. The company had partially complied with another 154, and reported no specific response to at least nine requests during that period, although none were rejected. Most of these orders came from Germany and Turkey.
“Twitter has no choice but to comply with local government laws. If we don’t comply with local laws, we will be shut down,” Musk said in June 2023, responding to claims by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey that the Indian government had threatened to “shut down Twitter” if it did not remove critical content during the farmers’ protests.
Publicly, however, Musk has taken a tougher stance against the removal requests, criticizing authorities in both India and Australia and calling former Twitter employee and Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant a “censor.”
But Musk’s most significant move to protect X’s accounts from government censorship came earlier this year when he said he wouldn’t comply with a Brazilian court order to block some accounts — a move that resulted in X being hit with a heavy fine, Musk’s Starlink having its financial assets frozen, and X being banned in Brazil, where it has 21 million users.
To sway public opinion, Musk earlier this month began uncovering accounts that Brazil and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, whom he calls an “evil tyrant,” had asked to be banned, including accounts run by the family of Oswaldo Eustachio, who is on an arrest warrant in Brazil for allegedly inciting and organizing the January 8 riots that broke into and destroyed Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court, and a current senator, Marcos Ribeiro do Val.
After three weeks of failing to comply with a Brazilian court order, X caved in last Friday, saying in a filing that it had complied with the order so that access to the platform could be restored. It is unclear whether Starlink, for which Brazil paid $2 million to help cover X’s fine, will pursue legal action as Musk previously suggested.