X, formerly known as Twitter, has lifted bans on 6,103 Australian users, including 194 who were initially banned for hateful content in the six months leading up to May 2023.
This move came a month after Elon Musk’s takeover in October 2022, where he declared a “general amnesty to suspended accounts,” as long as they hadn’t violated the law or engaged in egregious spam.
For the first time, the nation’s digital safety watchdog revealed the number of pardoned users related to Australia. According to the eSafety Commissioner’s report, X did not subject the reinstated accounts to additional scrutiny.
During the same six-month period, X suspended 387,056 Australian users, with 1,196 of them violating the company’s hateful content policy.
The information about the unbanned accounts and suspension statistics was provided by X in response to legal notices from eSafety issued in June 2023. These notices demanded answers about how X complies with regulations to protect users from hateful content.
Despite two extensions granted to X, the response was considered “non-compliant” by Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who had to insist on resubmitted responses due to inaccuracies, significant incompleteness, or irrelevance.
The report also highlighted a 20% increase in the time X took to respond to reports of hateful content in tweets and a 75% increase in response time to reports of direct messages violating the hateful content policy over the six months.
Coinciding with these delays, the report provided statistics on X’s reduction in global and local teams dedicated to trust and safety. X’s total number of engineers focused on trust and safety dropped from 279 to 55 between October 27, 2022 (the day after Musk’s acquisition), and May 31, 2023. Global content moderators decreased from 2,720 to 2,356, and public policy staff dropped from 68 to 15 globally, with none remaining in Australia.
However, the report noted that X contested the framing of the commissioner’s questions, stating that it had no full-time staff dedicated specifically to hateful conduct issues globally and no specific team for this policy.
Between December 2022 and May 2023, X removed approximately 917,300 tweets for violating its hateful content policy. The report also revealed that 1.87% of tweets from Twitter Blue subscribers were removed for hateful conduct, compared to 98.13% for regular users.
X emphasized its “freedom of speech, not reach” policy, which involves restricting the reach of posts that meet the threshold for enforcement according to its terms of service. The company aims to adopt a more proportionate remediation approach for content that doesn’t target specific individuals.
