Under Elon Musk, Twitter is submitting to additional government regulations.
The company has received 971 government demands since Musk took leadership, and 808 of them have been fully complied with. Twitter’s full compliance rate was about 50% before Musk’s acquisition, but it rose to nearly 80%.
Elon Musk seized control of Twitter precisely six months ago, pledging a new era of unrestricted speech and freedom from political prejudice. However, Twitter has complied with hundreds more government orders for censoring or surveillance under Musk, according to the company’s self-reported data, particularly in nations like Turkey and India.
According to information from Twitter’s Lumen database disclosures, 971 requests from governments and courts were sent to Twitter between October 27, 2022, and April 26, 2023. Among these requests were directives to take down contentious posts and requests that Twitter provide personal information to identify anonymous accounts. According to Twitter, it partially complied with 154 of those requests and fully complied with 808 of them. (It did not disclose any specific response for nine inquiries.)
Most concerningly, Twitter did not refuse to comply with any requests, as it had done multiple times before the Musk takeover, according to its self-reports. In the six months before Musk’s takeover, Twitter denied three of these requests; in the six months before that, it denied five.
In general, the data indicates a sharp rise in the percentage of requests that Twitter fully complies with. The number had been close to 50% in the year before Musk’s acquisition, which was consistent with the compliance rate stated in the business’s last transparency report. The percentage rises to 83% following Musk’s takeover (808 requests out of 971).
Although the orders cover a wide range of topics, they all entail a government requesting that Twitter either delete content or divulge user information. India’s communications ministry asked Twitter to remove all postings that shared videos from a BBC documentary about Prime Minister Narendra Modi in one instance from January. Numerous positions were eliminated, including one held by a local lawmaker.
The data is taken from the Lumen database, which is a public repository for takedown requests and other rules issued by the government to online speech platforms. For more than 20 years, Lumen, which is run by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, has gathered government requests from internet platforms, including Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google.
Since Musk took leadership, Twitter has not released a transparency report; but, as part of its system for handling government demands, the firm has continued to submit data automatically to Lumen. Although Lumen also gathers information on content that has been taken down due to intellectual property or defamation issues, the Rest of the World only considered court orders and direct requests from governmental organizations for this analysis.
Platform self-reporting makes up all of Lumen’s data, and completeness of the reports is not required by law. However, outside assessments have mainly validated the accuracy of the data, which is regarded as canonical within the business. Adam Holland, who oversees the initiative for the Berkman Klein Center, told Rest of World, “Historically, it seems Twitter has sent a copy of everything they’ve received to us.” “From what I understand, they have a small team working on this, and the process is mostly automated.”
The largest anomaly occurred when Twitter’s self-reports suddenly ceased earlier this month. The volume of new complaints stopped on April 15 after averaging more than 100 copyright claims per day, and Twitter hasn’t reported to the database in 12 days. Holland is still investigating the reason behind the suspension and is uncertain if it was caused by a technical malfunction or a conscious decision made by Twitter. Because so much excellent research is being done, he stated, “I would be saddened if it turned out they decided to stop sharing.”
The Rest of the World contrasted Lumen reports from the Musk era of Twitter (October 2022 to April 2023) with the preceding two six-month periods to contextualize the data. The findings indicate that when comparing Musk’s first six months to the same time last year, the number of government inquiries to Twitter more than doubled, from 348 to 971. The number of requests that were denied throughout that time did not rise comparably.
It’s possible that factors beyond Twitter’s control contributed to the increase in requests overall. Countries that have recently enacted restrictive speech rules, most notably the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and India, account for the majority of the recent requests. Germany, which received 255 requests, has stepped up its enforcement following changes to a 2017 law that forbade extremism and hate speech.
Twitter actively fought requests from many of these same governments while it was owned by someone else. Due in part to its failure to globally block a post accusing a former government official of corruption, the site was banned from Turkey for two weeks in 2014.
One of the first executives ousted when Musk took over was Vijaya Gadde, who spearheaded that charge. The business filed a lawsuit against the Indian government in July 2022 over a directive to limit the appearance of particular tweets. However, following Musk’s takeover, Twitter complied with over 100 ban orders issued by the nation, including ones targeting foreign politicians, journalists, and poet Rupi Kaur.
Twitter provided no additional commentary in response to the email from the Rest of the World, instead responding with an automatic emoji.
Musk has slashed many of the departments that handle government requests as part of the sharp decline in Twitter’s workforce, which may have made it harder for the company to withstand such directives. However, Musk has stated in interviews that his idea of free expression does not include demands for legal assistance.
In a recent BBC interview, he stated, “We can’t go beyond a country’s laws.” “If we have to choose between our people going to jail or following the law, we’ll follow the law.”
X has become Elon Musk’s political playground.
Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, has made use of the site as a political platform ahead of the US elections.
In a video that Musk shared on July 26, Democratic presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris is shown claiming to be a “deep-state puppet” and the “ultimate DEI hire” due to a deepfake of her voice. The post is now marked as a parody with a community note. However, a lot of people claimed that the film might have broken X’s rules regarding artificial intelligence-altered or synthetic media if it had been distributed without the proper context.
On artificial or Al-modified medium.
Musk’s recent political rhetoric culminated in this. After formally supporting former President Donald Trump, Musk has in the past month fueled ludicrous rumors of a “coup” after Biden’s exit from the presidential race and implied that the Trump assassination attempt may have been the consequence of a deliberate Secret Service blunder. Musk first pledged to pay $45 million per month to the pro-Trump political action committee (PAC) he was forming after embracing Trump, but he then changed his mind.
Musk’s increasingly political behavior surrounding the US elections and other significant events, according to former Twitter trust and safety staff, is evidence that he is engaging in the identical activity he criticized the company’s previous leadership of playing politics. “It’s staggering hypocrisy,” a former employee of Twitter says. “Musk is astute enough to understand that social media is media and that it can be used to manipulate the narrative.”
Concerned that Musk presents a new type of actor—someone who actively seeks to use a platform to reshape politics in the US and abroad and is willing to endure regulatory fines and declining advertising revenue to do so—three former employees spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
“He is consolidating power and has systematically dismantled all markers of credibility at the company,” claims the former worker. But when the target is a presidential contender, I believe it assumes much greater significance.
Officials seem to concur. After Grok, the platform’s generative Al search tool returned inaccurate results indicating Harris had missed the deadline to be on the presidential ballot in nine states earlier this week, secretaries of state from Minnesota, Washington, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Mexico wrote to X to request changes.
For years, Musk has been building to this point. In 2022, he pledged to uphold free expression when he bought Twitter. Most of the company’s policy, trust, and safety employees, who were in charge of removing offensive and misleading content from the platform, were sacked by Musk as soon as he took over. Those in charge of steering the platform through controversial elections were among them. There is now no one at the firm to handle the deluge of election-related misinformation, let alone what Musk himself might propagate, as the former employees pointed out.
According to the former employee, “There’s almost no one left,” According to a recent Pew Research survey, X has become more politicized, and hate speech and misinformation have increased on the website. It has gained popularity among Republicans since Musk took over, while Democrats are less likely than Republicans to think that the site welcomes their opinions.
Under Musk, users who had been removed from the network for breaking Twitter’s community guidelines were allowed to rejoin, changing the real makeup of the user base. After Trump was notably unbanned, a wide range of neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists, and avowed white supremacists returned to the site, including election skeptic Mike Lindell, conspiracy theorist Ale Jones, QAnon supporter Liz Crokin, and far-right pundit Nick Fuentes.
In conclusion, there is still much disagreement about Twitter’s political balance under Elon Musk’s direction. Changes in platform regulations and content control brought about by Musk’s free speech-focused vision for Twitter have been criticized for favoring conservative viewpoints. Critics say this change has made room for damaging language and false information, while supporters say it has restored a sense of impartiality and fairness. The platform’s future course ultimately rests on its ability to strike a balance between responsible moderation and open discourse, guaranteeing that all political viewpoints may coexist without jeopardizing public safety or confidence.
