Social media network X (formerly known as Twitter) released its first content moderation transparency report in compliance with new European legislation for online platforms, which revealed that France is a standout in Europe in terms of the amount of violent and illegal content.
The platform employs 52 moderators who are entirely in charge of French material.
France had the greatest number of reports, content removals, and suspensions for violent and hateful content on X among the 27 European Union members, exceeding both Germany and Spain. The content surveillance in France, carried out from August 28 to October 20, resulted in 16,288 message removals, while Spain had 7,743 and Germany 7,160.
The banned content in France includes over 4,300 harassing messages, significantly higher than the statistics in Spain 1,200 and in Germany 1,000.
Furthermore, France had nearly 6,000 incidents of violent content, compared to less than 2,000 in Germany, 1,100 in the Netherlands, and 4,100 in Spain.
This transparency report is mandated by the Digital Services Act (DSA), a new European Union law that went into force in August. It requires major online platforms such as X, Meta, TikTok, and Google to remove illegal content and describe their content governance procedures.
X claims to have an “international and cross-functional team” of “human moderators” who operate around the clock and in many languages: 52 human moderators for French material, 2,294 for English, 81 for German, 12 for Arabic, and two for Italian.
The European Commission has chastised Elon Musk’s social media platform X for its lack of moderation during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The platform was charged with disseminating fake news, violent content, and hate speech, which could result in fines of up to 6% of its global revenue.