From January to November of 2023, X permanently suspended over 11 million accounts for violations of its child sexual exploitation policies, the company said.
Elon Musk’s X is now scanning videos and GIFs uploaded to the platform for child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) as part of wider efforts to crack down on child sexual exploitation online.
The social media site announced the new measure in a Dec. 28 blog post in which its safety team stressed tackling child sexual exploitation (CSE) online is a top priority.
“At X, we have zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation, and we are determined to make X inhospitable for actors who seek to exploit minors in any way,” the company said.
The platform’s safety team also noted it has “strengthened enforcement and refined detection mechanisms” throughout the year as part of efforts to crack down on child sexual abuse materials on the site, and has increased the number of referrals sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
From January to November of 2023, X permanently suspended over 11 million accounts for violations of its CSE policies, the company said.
In 2022, prior to Mr. Musk taking over the platform, which was then called Twitter, the site suspended just 2.3 million accounts, officials said.
In the first six months of this year, X sent a total of 430,000 reports to the NCMEC CyberTipline compared to just over 98,000 reports sent in 2022, according to Thursday’s blog post.
New Measures Help Tackle Child Exploitation
“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,” the company said. 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 percent since December 2022.”
That measure, a “Search Intervention for CSE Keywords” allows the platform to entirely block search results for certain terms. Since December 2022, X has added more than 2,500 CSE keywords and phrases to that list to prevent users from searching for common CSE terms, officials said.
Additionally, the social media platform has rolled out “Expanded Hash Matching” for videos and GIFs, whereby employees evaluate all videos and gifts uploaded to the site for CSAM.
