Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, recently rolled out a new performance update as concerns continue to grow regarding their new approach to content moderation and how more offensive and potentially harmful posts remain active within the app.
X released the following on their official blog: “From January to November of 2023, X permanently suspended over 11 million accounts for violations of our CSE policies. For reference, in all of 2022, Twitter suspended 2.3 million accounts.”
“Not only are we detecting more bad actors faster, we’re also building new defenses that proactively reduce the discoverability of posts that contain this type of content. One such measure that we have recently implemented has reduced the number of successful searches for known Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) patterns by over 99% since December 2022.”
Here is a look to what is being worked on:
“We’re investing in products and people to bolster our ability to detect and action more content and accounts, and are actively evaluating advanced technologies from third-party developers that can enhance our capabilities. Some highlights include:
- Automated NCMEC reporting: In February 2023, we sent our first ever fully-automated NCMEC CyberTipline report. Historically, every NCMEC report was manually reviewed and created by an agent. Through our media hash matching with Thorn, we now have high-confidence CSAM hash matches that we automatically suspend, deactivate, and report to NCMEC without human involvement.
- Expanded Hash Matching to Videos and GIFs: For the first time ever, we are evaluating all videos and gifs posted on X for CSAM. Since launching this new approach in July 2023 we have matched over 25,000 pieces of media.
- Launched Search Intervention for CSE Keywords: CSAM impressions occur more on search than on any other product surface. In December 2022 we launched the ability to entirely block search results for certain terms. We have since added more than 2,500 CSE keywords and phrases to this list to prevent users from searching for common CSE terms.”
The platform had pushed away a number of advertisers, and owner Elon Musk seemed to push back flippantly about it, so where the social media platform goes in 2024 will be an interesting story to watch unfold.
