Elon Musk might have vowed to be a free-speech absolutist when he bought Twitter, but the number of accounts the site, now called X, has banned in the first half of this year are nearly three times the number from the same period in 2022.
X has released its first transparency report, which details its content-moderation policies, since Musk took control of the company. And in the first six months of this year, the social network has suspended 5.3 million accounts, compared to 1.6 million in the first half of 2022.
(Those numbers do not include the spam accounts that were suspended. X says 464 million of those were taken offline in the first half of the year.)
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The site said it had received over 224 million user reports in the first half of the year, citing different forms of abusive behavior—nearly 82 million of those fell under the category of abuse and harassment, which represented 36.5% of the total complaints. Hateful conduct was second, with nearly 67 million reports. Violent content was third with 40 million reports.
A total of 10,675,908 posts were either removed or labeled in the first half of the year.
The numbers underscore the concerns that advertisers have expressed about the site since Musk’s takeover—a growing amount of hate speech and abusive content. X claims in the report that this constitutes less than 1% of overall posts on the platform, but the significant increase in banned accounts seem to signal the problem has escalated.
X also shared information on requests from governments, saying it had received 18,737 government requests for information in the first half of the year. The majority of those, some 7,872, came from within the European Union. The U.S. Government sent 3,329 requests.
