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it home reported on september 25 that the social media platform x (formerly twitter) today released its first comprehensive transparency report since elon musk took over. the report provides new insights into how x enforces its rules as it strives to retain advertisers who are concerned about bad content on the platform.

image source: pexels

the report, which details content removals and bans for the first half of 2024, shows that bans have more than tripled since the last time the company shared data. x banned nearly 5.3 million accounts during that period, compared to 1.6 million in the first half of 2022.

in addition to the bans, x also said it "removed or flagged" more than 10.6 million posts that violated its rules. nearly half of those posts violated the company's hate speech policy, with x taking action on 4.9 million such posts. posts containing insults and harassment (2.6 million posts) and violent content (2.2 million posts) also accounted for a significant proportion.

while these numbers don’t fully reflect the state of content on x, they show that hate, abuse and violent content are among the biggest problems facing the platform. these are also issues that have been of concern to many advertisers and civil rights organizations since musk acquired the company. x claimed in the report that illegal content accounts for less than 1% of all posts on the platform.

it home noted that the numbers also show that this type of content has grown significantly since twitter last shared numbers before musk's acquisition. for example, in the second half of 2021, the last time twitter shared such data, the company reported that it had banned about 1.3 million accounts for violating its terms of service and "took action" on about 4.3 million accounts.

x published a brief report in a 383-word blog post last april that shared some statistics about content removals but provided few details on government requests for information or post removals. the new report is a significant improvement in this regard, reporting that x received 18,737 government requests for information, most of which came from within the eu, and disclosed information in response to 53% of the requests. x also received 72,703 government requests to remove content from its platform, and took action in more than 70% of the cases. japan accounted for the vast majority of these requests (46,648), followed by turkey (9,364).