Today X was released This is the company’s first transparency report since Elon Musk bought the company, formerly Twitter, in 2022.

Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter published transparency reports every six months. These covered much of the same subject matter as the new , removed for policy violation. The latest transparency report available on Twitter covered the second half of 2021 and consisted of 50 pages. (The

Comparing the 2021 report to the current Transparency Report X is a bit difficult, because the way the company measures different things has changed. For example, in 2021, 11.6 million accounts were reported. Of these 11.6 million, 4.3 million were subject to “action” and 1.3 million were suspended. According to the new X report, there were more than 224 million reports, both of accounts and individual content, but the result was the suspension of 5.2 million accounts.

Although some numbers remain seemingly consistent across the reports (reports of abuse and harassment are predictably high), in other areas there is a marked difference. For example, in the 2021 report, accounts flagged for hateful content accounted for nearly half of all reports, and 1 million of the 4.3 million accounts were subject to action. (Previously, the reports were interactive on the website; the current PDF no longer allows users to drill down into the data for more detailed information.) In the new X report, the company claims to have taken action against only 2,361 accounts for posting hateful content. .

But that may be because X’s policies have changed since it became Twitter, which according to Theodora Skeadas, a former member of Twitter’s public policy team who helped create its Moderation Research Consortium, could transparently change the appearance of the numbers. report. For example, last year the company changed its hate speech policies, which previously covered misgendering and deadnaming, and rolled back its rules around Covid-19 misinformation in November 2022.

“As some policies have been changed, some content is no longer infringing. So if you look at changes in quality of experience, that might be difficult to reflect in a transparency report,” she says.