This is a requirement of the new European regulation for platforms. The social network X (formerly Twitter) published its first transparency report on content control on Sunday. France, which holds the palm in Europe of violent and illicit speech, has 52 moderators.
Among the 27 members of the EU, reports of content, deletions and suspensions for violent and hateful speech within X are the most numerous in France, far ahead of Germany and Spain. The monitoring of content on the network in France conducted by X over the period from August 28 to October 20 resulted in 16,288 message deletions against 7,160 in Germany and 7,743 in Spain, the most active country on the network in terms of users.
In France, among these deleted contents, there are nearly 4,300 harassing messages compared to more than 1,000 in Germany and 1,200 in Spain. There were also more than 6,000 violent remarks, compared with less than 2,000 in Germany, 1,100 in the Netherlands and 4,100 in Spain.
Investigation for "fake news"
This transparency report is required by the EU's new regulation, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force in August. It requires major online platforms – from X and Meta to TikTok and Google – to take action to remove illegal content and to detail how they moderate content.
X explains that he has an "international and cross-functional team" of "human moderators", who work "24 hours a day with the ability to cover multiple languages". X – which moderates much of the content automatically – has 24 human moderators in French, the report says. The network has 52,2 in English, 294 in German, 81 in Arabic and 12 in Italian.
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In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, triggered by the bloody attack by Palestinian Hamas on Israeli soil on October 7, the social network X, led by Elon Musk, has been singled out by the European Commission for its lack of moderation, contrary to the DSA. On 12 October, the Commission announced the opening of an investigation into the social network for the alleged dissemination of "false information", "violent and terrorist content" or "hate speech". X incurs a fine of up to 6% of its worldwide turnover in this procedure.