X Under Musk: Suspensions rise 307%, driven by action against child abuse

X suspensions have more than quadrupled since Elon Musk bought Twitter, the social platform reported Wednesday. At the same time, X is censoring far less content and violating its “hateful content” policies than it did before Musk’s ownership.

That may seem strange, so let’s dig a little deeper into the numbers.

The key takeaway: X.com suspended 5.3 million accounts in the first half of 2024, according to a new Global Transparency Report, the first report the company has released since Musk took over in 2022. That’s a 307% increase in suspensions compared to the last report, which looked at the second half of 2021, when 1.3 million accounts were suspended.

What’s behind the increase in suspensions? X.com is going after many more accounts that violate its rules against children, with 2.78 million accounts penalized for violating its “Child Safety” policy.

The policy is “designed to protect minors from sexual and physical abuse, as well as psychological harm that may result from sharing such content,” according to X’s rules. This category includes content that “contains child sexual exploitation, media depicting physical child abuse, and media of minors in physical confrontation.”

In the second half of 2021, the company then known as Twitter suspended nearly 600,000 accounts for violating its rules against child sexual exploitation.

What X doesn’t do as much is censor content that violates its “hateful conduct” policy. In the first half of 2024, X suspended 2,361 accounts for violating its policy — a 97.9% decrease from 2021, when the company was still run by Jack Dorsey.

X’s “hateful conduct” policy states that users “may not directly attack other people based on race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious belief, age, disability, or serious disease.”

Since taking over Twitter, Musk has indicated that he wants to be more active in promoting freedom of expression than the previous regime.

“Freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy,” Musk posted earlier this year. “That’s why it’s the FIRST Amendment. Without freedom of speech, all is lost.”

There are a few other things worth noting in Wednesday’s report, including how many messages are being deleted. X deleted or added labels to 10.68 million messages in the first half of 2024; in the second half of 2021, the company said it deleted 5.1 million messages.

Under Musk, X also took action against more accounts that violated its “abuse and harassment” rules. X suspended 1.1 million accounts for violating these policies, about 70,000 more than in the 2021 report.

You can read the full X Transparency Report yourself by clicking here.