X, formerly Twitter, is ramping up its efforts to eradicate child sexual abuse material on its platform by evaluating all uploaded videos and GIFs, according to a Thursday press release.
The social media platform, owned by Elon Musk, reaffirmed its commitment to removing the illegal content and provided an update on its progress.
“Last year we made clear that our #1 priority was tackling child sexual exploitation (CSE) online. 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,” X’s press release stated.
The social media site reported that it has significantly increased the number of reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and permanently suspended more than 11 million accounts from January to November 2023. It noted that in 2022, before Musk’s takeover, Twitter only suspended 2.3 million accounts accused of CSE violations.
“In the first half of 2023, X sent a total of 430,000 reports to the NCMEC CyberTipline. In all of 2022, Twitter sent over 98,000 reports,” X stated.
“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 press release continued. “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% since December 2022.”
Earlier this year, the platform rolled out a “fully-automated NCMEC CyberTipline report.” Before this advancement, reports were manually created and reviewed by employees.
In July, X also began checking all videos and gifs uploaded to the platform with its “expanded hash matching.” Since then, it has found and removed 25,000 pieces of content from the site.
Last year, the platform enabled the ability to block search results for specific terms. It noted that, since then, 2,500 keywords and phrases associated with CSAM have been added to the block list.
X continued, “Ultimately, it is critical that the bad actors be brought to justice and that law enforcement has the tools and information they need to prosecute these heinous crimes. X cooperates with law enforcement around the world and provides an online portal to submit removal requests, information requests, preservation requests, and emergency requests.”
“Our work to stop child sexual exploitation will continue to be our top priority. Until child sexual exploitation is brought to an end, our work will never stop,” it concluded.
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