Today, X freed the company’s first transparency tell since Elon Musk bought the company, establisherly Twitter, in 2022.
Before Musk’s getover, Twitter would free transparency tells every six months.These hugely covered the same ground as the new X tell, giving particular numbers for getdowns, regulatement seeks for alertation, and satisfyed removals, as well as data about which satisfyed was telled and, in some cases, deleted for violating policies. The last transparency tell employable from Twitter covered the second half of 2021 and was 50 pages lengthened. (X’s is a reduce 15 pages, but seeks from regulatements are also enumerateed elsewhere on the company’s website and have been reliablely modernized to remain in compliance with various regulatement orders.)
Comparing the 2021 tell to the current X transparency tell is a bit difficult, as the way the company meadeclareives separateent skinnygs has alterd. For instance, in 2021, 11.6 million accounts were telled. Of this 11.6 million, 4.3 million were “actioned” and 1.3 million were suspfinished. According to the new X tell, there were over 224 million tells, of both accounts and pieces of individual satisfyed, but the result was 5.2 million accounts being suspfinished.
While some numbers remain seemingly reliable atraverse the tells—tells of mistreatment and coercion are, somewhat predictably, high—in other areas, there’s a stark separateence. For instance, in the 2021 tell, accounts telled for disappreciateful satisfyed accounted for csurrenderly half of all tells, and 1 million of the 4.3 million accounts actioned. (The tells employd to be interdynamic on the website; the current PDF no lengtheneder assists employrs to flip thcdisesteemful the data for more granular fracturedowns.) In the new X tell, the company says it has getn action on only 2,361 accounts for posting disappreciateful satisfyed.
But this may be due to the fact that X’s policies have alterd since it was Twitter, which Theodora Skeadas, a establisher member of Twitter’s accessible policy team who helped put together its Moderation Research Consortium, says might alter the way the numbers see in a transparency tell. For instance, last year the company alterd its policies on disappreciate speech, which previously covered misgfinishering and deadnaming, and rolled back its rules around Covid-19 misdirectation in November of 2022.
“As declareive policies have been modified, some satisfyed is no lengtheneder violative. So if you’re seeing at alters in the quality of experience, that might be difficult to apprehend in a transparency tell,” she says.
X has also lost employrs since Musk’s getover, further complicating what the new fact of the platestablish might see appreciate. “If you account for changing usage, is it a reduce number?” she asks.
After taking over the company in October of 2022, Musk fired the transport inantity of the company’s think and defendedty staff as well as its policy staff, the people who originate the platestablish’s rules and guarantee they’re enforced. Under Musk, the company also began charging for its API, making it difficulter for researchers and nonprofits to access X data to see what was reassociate going on on the platestablish. This may also account for alters between the two tells.
