Social media platform X is looking to increase its content moderation staff by 100 to fight child abuse content on the site.
The platform announced the new team, dubbed the “Trust and Safety center of excellence,” on Saturday. The team is still being built and will be headquartered in Austin, Texas. X hopes to fill all the positions by the end of the year.
The announcement of a beefed-up content moderation team comes as X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino prepares to join tech executives in testifying before the U.S. Senate on Wednesday. The leaders of X, Meta, Discord, TikTok and Snapchat are expected to discuss their platform’s policies towards child abuse content.
X asserted its commitment to eliminating child abuse content on the site in a Friday blog post, where it said it suspended more than 12 million accounts for violating its child exploitation policies in 2023. This would be a big improvement over 2022 where, according to X, the platform suspended 2.3 million accounts for violating child exploitation policies.
Since taking over the platform in late 2022, X owner Elon Musk has faced intense criticism for his content moderation policies, which critics say are often unpredictable and scattered. Upon taking control, Mr. Musk oversaw massive layoffs, including a large chunk of the content moderation staff at what was then called Twitter.
Since then, X has been at the center of several content controversies, where divisive or illegal content was able to stay up on the site. Most recently, AI-generated pornographic images of pop sensation Taylor Swift sparked enough outrage to get mentioned by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.