• by Colin Kirkland , September 26, 2024

X has issued its first official transparency report since Elon Musk took over the platform, previously known as Twitter.

Based on the results, it appears that under Musk's ownership and “free speech” approach to content moderation, the social-media company is actually removing more accounts and content than Twitter did, but is suspending far fewer users for hate speech.

The report -- which highlights the platform's reported rule violations, content-removal requests, and other enforcement actions taken over the first half of 2024 -- breaks down how many users (human and automated) have been suspended, as well as which content has been removed or labeled by X's content-moderation team and system.

When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he quickly eliminated much of the company's content-moderation team and introduced a new strategy rooted in what he calls “free speech.”

Over the past two years, Musk's approach has prompted concerns among advertisers, contributing to a massive decline in ad revenue and brand equity.

However, despite Musk's public endorsement of “free speech” and user-based moderation via the Community Notes feature, the results from the company's first transparency report show that the platform is removing more content and actioning more legal requests than Twitter did in its final report.

In the first half of 2024, X suspended 5.2 million accounts based on rule violations, and removed 10.7 million posts for the same reason -- compared to Twitter's removal of 6.6 million posts in 2022 and action taken against 5 million accounts, with only 1.6 million of them suspended for violations.

X is also complying with more legal requests than Twitter. In the report, X received 72,000 requests and complied with 70% of them, while Twitter received 52,000 legal requests in 2022 and comp-lied with around 54% of them.

Still, recent concerns over the rise of hate speech and misinformation on X may be warranted. According to the company's data, very few reported incidents of abuse and harassment on the app resulted in suspension.

Of 81 million incidents reported by users in the first half of 2024, only 1.35% of abusing accounts were suspended, and only 0.004% of users reported for posting hate speech were removed.

Under Twitter, in the first half of 2022, pre-Musk, the platform suspended 111 thousand users for hateful conduct, compared to 2.3 thousand in this current report.