X Releases First Transparency Report Post-Musk Takeover

X, formerly known as Twitter, has published its first Global Transparency Report since Elon Musk’s acquisition in 2022. Covering the first half of 2024, the report outlines the platform’s enforcement of content policies, user reports, government information requests, and content removals.

From January to June 2024, X received over 224 million user reports, with the majority concerning abuse and harassment (82 million), followed by violent conduct (40 million) and hateful behavior (67 million). The platform responded by deleting or flagging 10.7 million posts and suspending 5.3 million accounts, although only 0.01% of posts were found to violate policies.

This is significantly below what was previously claimed, showing that only a small minority (less than 1%) of accounts posting hateful content and other TOS-breaking posts were actually banned. This falls in like with the changes that came with Musk’s $44 billion acquisition, including the rollback of previous content moderation rules and reinstating banned accounts, sparking criticism from groups who felt that the bans were justified.

While there has been a lot of back-and-forth arguing about the state of X and its moderation, these reports will hopefully become a regular and publicly-available set of data about the site’s approach to content moderation. At the very least, if this happens, they should make it easier to tell how effective (and consistent) the platform’s moderation will become in the future.