Elon Musk may have vowed to be absolute advocates of free speech when he bought Twitter, but the site, now called X, has banned nearly three times as many accounts in the first half of this year as it did in the same period in 2022.
X released its first transparency report detailing its content moderation policies since Musk took over the company, and the social network also suspended 5.3 million accounts in the first half of this year, significantly higher than the 1.6 million in the first half of 2022.
(These figures don’t include suspended spam accounts, of which X said 464 million were taken offline in the first half of the year.)
The site received more than 224 million user reports in the first half of the year, citing various forms of abusive behavior. About 82 million of those fell into the category of abuse or harassment, accounting for 36.5% of all complaints. Hateful conduct came in second with about 67 million reports. Violent content came in third with 40 million reports.
A total of 10,675,908 posts were removed or labeled in the first half of this year.
The figures highlight concerns that advertisers have expressed about the rise in hate speech and abusive content on the site since Musk’s acquisition. While X claims in the report that such posts make up less than 1% of all posts on the platform, the significant increase in banned accounts seems to indicate a worsening problem.
Company X also shared information about government requests, saying it received 18,737 government requests in the first half of this year, the majority of which, about 7,872, were from within the European Union, while 3,329 were from the US government.
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