Elon Musk’s X to hire 100 content moderators in Austin this year

Elon Musk’s X is in the process of hiring 100 content moderators for a new office in Austin, Texas, that will focus on fighting child abuse online on the social media platform, an executive said on Saturday.

X, formerly known as Twitter, announced a new “Trust and Safety center of excellence” in a blog post by CEO Linda Yaccarino on Friday. The new initiative comes as part of the company’s efforts to combat child sexual exploitation (CSE) on the social media platform.

“While X is not the platform of choice for children and minors – users between 13-17 account for less than 1% of our daily U.S. users – we have made it more difficult for bad actors to share or engage with CSE material on X, while simultaneously making it simpler for our users to report CSE content,” Yaccarino wrote.

She added that the platform is “improving our detection mechanisms to find more reportable content on the platform to report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).”

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The post noted that X suspended 12.4 million accounts for violating the platform’s CSE policies in 2023 – a dramatic uptick from 2.3 million account suspensions in 2022. 

The company also referred 850,000 reports to NCMEC in 2023, including through X’s first ever fully-automated report. 

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The company said that was over eight times more than what Twitter referred to NCMEC in 2022 before it was acquired by the Elon Musk-led ownership group.

Following Musk’s 2022 takeover of Twitter, he has faced criticism for the content moderation policy changes to the social media site, which caused some advertisers to reconsider their spending on the platform.

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X is in the process of hiring content moderation staff for the new Trust and Safety center of excellence in Austin, Texas.

“The team is currently being built,” said Joe Benarroch, X’s head of business operations, about the Austin office. He added that the goal to fill the positions by the end of the year is dependent on finding the right talent.

The company added that the new Austin facility will also help X fight other types of harmful social media content.

Reuters contributed to this report.