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Elon Musk’s social media platform has released the first transparency report since he bought it in 2022, showing a company ready and able to comply with government takedown requests.
Before Wednesday, the company now called X Corp.’s last transparency report covered the final six months of 2021. That report included information on how the company, then called Twitter, enforced its rules, responded to government requests for information, legal demands to axe content, copyright and trademark notices, and other details.
According to The Washington Post, which reviewed X’s report, the website acted on 71% of the legal requests it received to remove content during the first half of 2024. That’s up 20% from 2021 and more than the roughly 30% of requests it complied with in prior years.
Many of those requests came from a few countries, such as Turkey and South Korea, and were often successful in getting content removed or restricted.
Sixty-eight percent of cases requested by Turkey — which has strict censorship laws and is led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has asked Musk to build a Tesla (TSLA-5.19%) factory in his country — were complied with. X also acted on 73% of those requested by South Korea, 79% of those requested by Japan, and 80% by the European Union.
That’s in stark contrast to Musk’s public position as a self-described “free speech absolutist,” especially in light of his recent, high-profile feud with Brazil’s government, although the company’s response falls in line with X’s actions over the first six months of his ownership.
In April 2023, Rest of World reported the company had fully complied with 808 out of 971 government demands it received between October 2022 and April 2023. It had partially complied in 154 other cases and failed to report a specific response for at least nine cases in that timeframe; none were refused. Most of those orders came from Germany and Turkey.
“Twitter doesn’t have a choice but to obey local governments. If we don’t obey local government laws, we will get shut down,” Musk said in June 2023, responding to claims from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey that India’s government had threatened to “shut Twitter down” if it failed to remove critical content during a farmers’ protest.
But publicly, Musk has taken a more hard-line stance against takedown requests, criticizing both Indian and Australian authorities and even labeling ex-Twitter employee and Australia’s eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant a “censorship commissar.”
But Musk’s biggest move to protect accounts on X from government censorship came earlier this year, when he said he would defy a Brazilian court order to block some accounts. That move led to X facing major fines, Musk’s Starlink having its financial assets frozen, and X being banned in Brazil, where it has 21 million users.
In an effort to sway public opinion, Musk, earlier this month, began revealing which accounts Brazil — and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who Musk has called an “evil tyrant” — demanded be banned. That includes an account operated by the family of Oswaldo Eustáquio, who is wanted for arrest in Brazil for allegedly inciting and organizing the Jan. 8 riot that invaded and vandalized Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court, and sitting senator Marcos Ribeiro Do Val.
After three weeks of defying Brazil’s courts, X caved in last Friday, saying in filings it had complied with the orders so that access to its platform could be reinstated. It’s unclear if Starlink, which Brazil took $2 million from to pay X’s fines, will take legal action as Musk has previously suggested.