Elon Musk’s X Ramps Up Fight Against Child Abuse with New Austin Office

Elon Musk’s social media platform ‘X’, previously known as Twitter, is currently in the process of recruiting 100 content moderators. These new hires will be based in a newly-established office in Austin, Texas, with a primary focus on curbing child abuse on the social media site, according to an executive’s statement on Saturday.

CEO Linda Yaccarino unveiled the “Trust and Safety center of excellence” in a recent blog post, highlighting this initiative as a key component of the company’s campaign against child sexual exploitation (CSE) on the platform.

Yaccarino pointed out, “Although X is not a primary platform for children and minors – with users aged 13-17 constituting less than 1% of our daily US users – we’ve intensified efforts to impede bad actors from disseminating or interacting with CSE material on X. We’ve also streamlined the process for users to report CSE content.”

She further mentioned the platform’s enhancements in identifying and reporting objectionable content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

The blog post revealed that X had suspended over 12.4 million accounts for breaching its CSE policies in 2023, a significant increase from 2.3 million suspensions in 2022. Additionally, the company reported about 850,000 cases to NCMEC in 2023, which included the platform’s first-ever fully-automated report.

These figures represent a significant rise compared to the referrals made by Twitter to NCMEC in 2022, before it was taken over by Elon Musk’s ownership group.

Following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022, his alterations to the content moderation policies have drawn criticism and led to some advertisers reassessing their investment in the platform.