Twitter Celebrates a Decade of Transparency with New Report

The platform reveals its efforts in defending the voices of its audience  

Today, Twitter released its twentieth report: Twitter’s commitment to transparency in action. As part of their efforts to improve the health of the public conversation, the report reflects on the platform’s progress over the past decade, and their vision going forward. 

Evolution of the platform’s transparency reporting over the past 10 years
Over the last 10 years attempts to control free expression, remove content, and reveal the identity of account owners on Twitter have evolved significantly. Meaningful transparency helps people understand the rules of online services and hold institutions accountable for their actions, and in turn, help keep platforms like Twitter accountable for principled content moderation and responsiveness to government demands. Transparency is a key guiding principle in Twitter’s mission to serve the public conversation, protect the Open Internet, and advance the internet as a global force for good. 

Investments in technology
In 2012, Twitter was one of the first social media companies to introduce a transparency report and since then it has become an industry standard. Over the past decade, the platform has made significant investments and developed their reporting including more data, insights and metrics. Twitter first reported data behind their enforcement of the Twitter Rules and in 2018, they significantly evolved their approach to how they detect and take down content that is against their rules. The biggest impact has been the use of their technology to proactively take down content quickly, oftentimes without that content ever needing to be reported by people on Twitter. 

Twitter is iterating the way the platform measures its effectiveness and has worked to move beyond the binary “leave up” or “take down” traditional approach to content moderation. For the latest reporting period, Twitter removed more than four million Tweets that violated the Twitter Rules. Twitter has also deployed less aggressive enforcement actions by labeling Tweets to add important context when the information shared doesn’t warrant Tweet deletion. 

One way the platform measures the efficacy of its investment in technology is by sharing how many impressions violative Tweets receive before they are removed. For the latest reporting period impressions on violative Tweets accounted for less than 0.1% of total impressions on all Tweets. Of the Tweets removed, 71% received fewer than 100 impressions prior to removal, while only  21% received between 100 and 1,000 impressions. These numbers have remained consistent since Twitter first began reporting the data in 2020, even as the volume of deleted rule-violating content has generally trended upward — indicating that Twitter’s proactive detection efforts are keeping pace with changing behavior. Twitter continues to invest heavily in improving both the speed and comprehensiveness of the platform’s detections.