“Twitter’s objective is to be an authentic, informative, entertaining, and trusted platform which empowers citizens’ free speech, an essential bedrock of a functional democracy.” That’s how Twitter’s 2022 transparency report starts – a transparency report that is required by the regulator, as per a directive from the Australian government, to touch on how the platform is combating the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
The blue bird site was officially scooped up by Elon Musk in October. The transparency report, however, prefers to describe it as:
“In Q4 2022, the company embarked on transformational change. New approaches are vital so our service and company can thrive. That work is reflected in our ongoing commitments to protecting user rights and safety.”
And
“Moving beyond a leave-up or take-down binary, protecting the space for public debate and providing full transparency are key to the Twitter service going forward.”
Transparency builds trust … pic.twitter.com/awAHx1nGQU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 29, 2023
Transparent.
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The transparency report is a commitment Twitter made to publishing every year as part of its involvement in Australia’s voluntary code of practice. Twitter’s 2022 report doesn’t really delve into combatting misinformation, but it does say how that could be thwarted.
Twitter considers its Community Notes feature to be a useful tool in combatting misinformation, so it said it will keep investing in that; likewise it considers its verification program (read: complete and utter shemozzle) one way Twitter users can stay on top of credible information. Sigh.
“As the public have seen over the past several months, Twitter is embracing public testing and substantial change. We believe that this open and transparent approach to innovation is healthy, as it enables us to move faster and gather user feedback in real-time,” it added.
Interestingly, over the reporting period (January through June 2022), Twitter said it required users to remove 6,586,109 pieces of content that violated the Twitter Rules, and took enforcement action on 5,096,272 accounts. 1,618,855 accounts were suspended for violating the Twitter Rules. 691,704 accounts were suspended due to breaching the platform’s child sexual exploitation policy – the next policy breached (in order of account suspension) was for ‘impersonation’, which had 249,572 accounts suspended, followed by ‘illegal or regulated goods’, which had 249,328 accounts suspended. Over 1.5 million instances of ‘hateful content’ was removed, too.
This isn’t misinformation, however, this is just awful stuff.
Transparent.