Twitter/X suspends many more people under Elon Musk

Yay, Twitter/X just released its first Global Transparency Report since Elon Musk took over and made everything worseand the numbers are pretty shocking, if not surprising on a fundamental level. Back when X was still called Twitter, the company would release reports every six months detailing suspension and reporting rates, but we haven’t seen one since the second half of 2021. With the new report, which you can read in full herewe can finally do a little comparing and contrasting.

On the one hand, account suspensions have increased dramatically. X suspended 5.3 million accounts in the first half of 2024, while Twitter suspended 1.3 million accounts in the second half of 2021. (That’s a 307% increase!) Per TheWrapthe company is taking a much tougher approach to accounts that it believes have violated its “child safety” policy. The company describes this policy as a “zero tolerance” mandate for “child sexual exploitation,” “media that physically depicts child abuse,” and “users who engage with that content” in order to “prevent the normalization of violence against children.”

In theory, that’s all well and good, but the suspensions based on “hateful conduct” tell a different story. Currently, X’s policy states that it prohibits “direct attacks based on race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.” In 2021, 4.3 million accounts were reported for hateful content, with 1 million of those users taking action, according to WiredThis year, X suspended only 2,361 accounts for policy violations, a 97.7% reduction according to TheWrapThink about that number for a moment: 2,361 accounts is about the size of a small university, to name a whole world of hate speech. That policy seems pretty ineffective at protecting kids who are black, queer, involved in a school shooting, or any of the other terrible discussions what we have seen on the platform in recent months.

Part of this decline can be attributed to the company’s narrowing of the definition of what counts as hate speech in the first place over the years. Last year, the company removed several protections for trans users that flagged posts that engaged in “targeted misgendering and deadnaming” (which, incidentally, is something Musk did to his own daughter Vivian). The policy had already been reversed the year before Misinformation about COVID-19 also. This is of course not surprising; if Musk had not changed the definition of intimidation, he might have violate his own policy every other day.