X brings back its transparency report for the first time since 2021
Despite how it looks, X claims to be a community safe zone — and a prime advertising playground — according to its latest transparency report.
No surprises there. The platform has been beating this drum ever since Elon Musk’s controversial takeover nearly two years ago. But what stands out this time is the medium through which the information was delivered: X’s first real transparency report since 2021.
Much like before, the new report outlines how X enforces its policies on illegal, hateful or fraudulent content. In the first half of the year, users reported 224,129,805 incidents where they believed those rules were violated.
Nearly four in 10 (36.47%) of those incidents were flagged for abuse and harassment, followed by hateful content (29.85%) and violent posts (17.85%). Other flagged issues in the report include private content (4.42%), misleading identities (2.31%) and violent/hateful entities (3.99%).
As a result, 5,296,870 accounts were suspended, while 10,675,980 posts were removed or labeled for violating platform rules.
X uses both machine learning and human moderators to make these calls, depending on user reports and proactive detection. Decisions hinge on factors like whether the report came from the victim or a bystander, the user’s history and the severity of the violation.
The outcome? The rate of violating posts versus suitable ones during the first half of the year was a minuscule 0.0123%, according to the report. That’s the number of posts removed or labeled for breaches, divided by the total posts made during the period. Essentially, it’s X’s way of saying the odds of stumbling across rule-breaking content are slim — at least, on paper.
Whether anyone buys that is another story. The platform’s not exactly celebrated for accuracy or truth these days, so it’s easy to imagine these numbers being met with a healthy dose of skepticism from users and advertisers alike.
Still, X has to do something to change that narrative. Since Musk’s takeover, concerns about content moderation and amplification have only grown — not because the policies themselves are flawed, but because enforcement has been seen as lacking. And any attempt by X’s leadership to claim otherwise has been undermined by the fact that the company’s transparency reports were essentially shelved. Bringing them back suggests a return to normality of sorts for a platform that was considered more transparent among its peers prior to Musk’s arrival.
With that said, this most recent iteration is very much a work in progress — the latest report doesn’t measure up to its predecessors. Key elements like government requests, once a core part of transparency reporting, are notably absent, as is any data covering the gap since the last report.
