X’s First Transparency Report Since Elon Musk’s Takeover ⇥ wired.com

Until this week, the most recent data available about the moderation activities of the company formerly known as Twitter could be found in a report covering the last six months of 2021. Maybe you heard, but Elon Musk began his process for acquiring the company in April 2022, and it concluded in October the same year. I am working my way through “Character Limit”, so I have just relived the experience of that era, and it was not good! Anyway, despite being enthusiastic about transparency, Musk’s X had not released any updates. Now, though, we have data for the first half of 2024 (PDF), and it is quite interesting.

Vittoria Elliott, Wired:

While some numbers remain seemingly consistent across the reports — reports of abuse and harassment are, somewhat predictably, high — in other areas, there’s a stark difference. For instance, in the 2021 report, accounts reported for hateful content accounted for nearly half of all reports, and 1 million of the 4.3 million accounts actioned. (The reports used to be interactive on the website; the current PDF no longer allows users to flip through the data for more granular breakdowns.) In the new X report, the company says it has taken action on only 2,361 accounts for posting hateful content.

Elliott quotes Michael Abboud, a spokesperson for X, saying “[a]s an entirely new company, we took time to rethink how best to transparently share data” about moderation activity. Nonsense. X is not really an “entirely new company”, and this is not a rethought report. It is very similar to the ones which came before, though it is less comprehensive and now in a slick PDF instead of on a slick webpage.

One of the key differences between the two reports is the way total reports of violative behaviour are measured. Twitter says over 11.6 million accounts were reported between July and December 2021. The company said these are de-duplicated; these are 11.6 million accounts against which the company received at least one report. In the X report, it says it received over 224 million “user reports” for the first six months of this year. The company does not share a comparable de-duplicated figure for how many individual accounts were reported, however, nor could I find a comparable total metric reported by Twitter.

Karissa Bell, Engadget:

The report, which details content takedowns and account suspensions from the first half of 2024, shows that suspensions have more than tripled since the last time the company shared data. X suspended just under 5.3 million accounts during the period, compared with 1.6 million suspensions during the first six months of 2022.

In addition to the suspensions, X says it “removed or labeled” more than 10.6 million posts for violating its rules. Violations of the company’s hateful conduct policy accounted for nearly half of that number, with X taking action on 4.9 million such posts. Posts containing abuse and harassment (2.6 million) and violent content (2.2 million) also accounted for a significant percentage of the takedowns and labels.

Abuse and harassment suspensions are up, from 82,971 in the July–December 2021 report to over 1.1 million in the 2024 one. There were 182,536 suspensions between January–June 2021, and 86,202 in July–December 2020. Perhaps X is more responsive to abuse and harassment reports compared to Twitter. But I bet this is indicative of the more abusive and harassing environment that is X today.

Cristiano Lima-Strong, Washington Post:

The site acted on 71 percent of the legal requests it received to remove content in the first half of this year, up 20 percent from the last time it reported the figure in 2021 and more than double the rate in preceding years, according to a new transparency report X published Wednesday and a Washington Post review of past disclosure data.

So X in 2024 is happier to grant government censorship requests — particularly from more authoritarian countries — more abusive, and more lenient with hateful posts than Twitter used to be. Sounds about right.

Christiaan Hetzner, Fortune:

Ferguson based his assessment on internal second-quarter figures recently obtained by the New York Times. According to this report, X booked $114 million worth of revenue in the U.S., its largest market by far. This represented a 25% drop over the preceding three months and a 53% drop over the year-ago period.

That already sounds bad. But it gets worse. The last publicly available figures prior to Musk’s acquisition, from Q2 of 2022, had revenue at $661 million. After you account for inflation, revenue has actually collapsed by 84%, in today’s dollars.

Advertisers do not want to prop up the expensive soapbox of an unhinged billionaire as the site becomes increasingly occupied by hostile squatters? What a surprise.

One could make a quite reasonable argument that businesses should not be so beholden to the desires of advertisers. The appeal of a publication or website to advertisers is not necessarily reflective of its quality. There is plenty of room for anti-advertising, anti-corporate media. But the failure of X to attract advertisers is not so much a subversive statement as it is an understandable free market response.