Twitter/X is suspending way more people under Elon Musk

Hoo boy, Twitter/X just released its first Global Transparency Report since Elon Musk took over and made everything worse, and the numbers are pretty shocking, if not all that surprising on a foundational level. When X was still called Twitter, the company would issue reports detailing its suspension and report rates every six months, but we haven’t seen one since the second half of 2021. With the new report, which you can read in full here, we can finally do a little compare-contrast.

On one hand, account suspensions are way, way, way up, with X suspending 5.3 million accounts in the first half of 2024 to Twitter’s 1.3 million in the second half of 2021. (That’s a 307% increase!) Per TheWrap, the company is cracking down a lot harder on accounts it deems to have violated its “child safety” policy, which the company details as a “zero tolerance” mandate for “child sexual exploitation,” “media that depicts physical 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. As of right now, 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 action being taken against 1 million of those users, according to Wired. This year, X suspended only 2,361 accounts for violating the policy, a 97.7% reduction according to TheWrap. Really think about that number for a second—2,361 accounts is about the size of a small university, to account for an entire world of hate speech. That policy seems rather ineffective at protecting children who are Black, or queer, or involved in a school shooting, or any of the other horrid discussions we’ve seen on the platform in recent months.

Part of this decrease could be attributed to the fact that the company has narrowed its 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 used to flag posts engaging in “targeted misgendering and deadnaming” (which is, by the way, something Musk did to his own daughter Vivian). The year before, it rolled back policies around COVID-19 misinformation as well. None of this is surprising, of course; if Musk hadn’t changed the definition of harassment, he may violate his own policies every other day.