France, European champion of content moderation? In any case, this is what the first transparency report on content control published by the social network X (formerly Twitter) shows this Sunday, November 5 and requested by the European Union’s DSA regulations. France, which holds the highest place in Europe for violent and illicit comments, has 52 moderators. Among the 27 members of the EU, reports of content, deletions and suspensions for violent and hateful comments within X are the most numerous in France, far ahead of Germany and Spain.
Monitoring of content on the network in France carried out by X’s transparency report covers the period from August 28 to October 20. 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.
Remove any illegal content
There are also more than 6,000 violent comments compared to less than 2,000 in Germany, 1,100 in the Netherlands and 4,100 in Spain. This transparency report is required by new EU regulations, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force in August. It requires major online platforms – from X to Meta, including TikTok and Google – to act to remove all illicit content and to detail how they moderate content.
X says it has an “international, cross-functional team” of “human moderators,” who work “around the clock with the ability to cover multiple languages.” In the case of France, X – which moderates a large part of the content automatically – has 52 human moderators in French, the report indicates. The network has 2,294 in English, 81 in German, 12 in Arabic and 2 in Italian.
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, was singled out by the European Commission for its lack of moderation , contrary to the DSA.