Today, X published the company's first transparency report since Elon Musk bought the company, formerly Twitter, in 2022.
Before Musk’s acquisition, Twitter released transparency reports every six months. These covered much the same ground as the new X report, with specific numbers for takedowns, government requests for information, and content removals, as well as data on what content was reported and, in some cases, removed for policy violations. Twitter’s last available transparency report covered the second half of 2021 and was 50 pages long. (X is a shorter 15 pages, but government requests are also listed elsewhere on the company’s website and have been consistently updated to comply with various government orders.)
Comparing the 2021 report to the current X Transparency Report is a bit tricky, as the way the company measures various things has changed. For example, in 2021, 11.6 million accounts were reported. Of those 11.6 million, 4.3 million were “traded” and 1.3 million were suspended. According to the new X Report, there were over 224 million reports, of both accounts and individual pieces of content, but the result was 5.2 million accounts being suspended.
While some numbers remain seemingly consistent across the reports—reports of abuse and harassment are, somewhat predictably, high—other areas vary widely. In the 2021 report, for example, accounts reported for hateful content accounted for nearly half of all reports, and 1 million of the 4.3 million accounts were addressed. (The reports were interactive on the website; the current PDF no longer allows users to drill down into the data for more granular breakdowns.) In the new X report, the company says it took action against just 2,361 accounts for posting hateful content.
But that could be because X’s policies have changed since it was Twitter, which could change how the numbers look in a transparency report, according to Theodora Skeadas, a former member of Twitter’s public policy team who helped put together the Moderation Research Consortium. For example, the company changed its hate speech policy last year, which previously covered misgendering and deadnaming, and in November 2022 it rolled back its rules around Covid-19 misinformation.
“As certain policies have changed, some content is no longer infringing, so if you're looking at changes in the quality of the experience, that can be difficult to capture in a transparency report,” she says.
X has also lost users since Musk took over, further complicating the platform’s new reality. “When you take into account changing usage, is it a lower number?” she asks.
After Musk took over the company in October 2022, he laid off most of the company’s trust and safety staff, as well as its policy staff, the people who create the platform’s rules and ensure they’re enforced. Under Musk, the company also began charging for its API, making it harder for researchers and nonprofits to access X data to see what’s really happening on the platform. This may also be the reason for the changes between the two reports.
