X Corp

X Corp, owned by Elon Musk, made a $1 million in-kind contribution to Trump's 2025 inauguration fund on January 15, 2025. The donation was not disclosed in original FEC filings and only appeared in a supplemental filing on July 18, 2025.

When X released its first transparency report under Musk's ownership in September 2024, covering Q1-Q2 2021, the company simultaneously removed all previous transparency reports that had been published since 2011 under prior ownership. Access Now's Transparency Reporting Index noted the removal as 'a blatant step to reduce transparency and accountability.' The new report provided significantly less detail across every metric compared to previous reports.

Following Elon Musk's October 2022 acquisition of Twitter (renamed X), advertising revenue plummeted approximately 54% year-over-year. By February 2023, more than half of X's top 1,000 advertisers had stopped spending on the platform. Projected 2023 ad revenue dropped to approximately $2.5 billion, down from $4.5 billion before the acquisition. The exodus was driven by Musk's content moderation rollbacks, reinstatement of banned accounts, and his own posting of antisemitic content endorsement in November 2023. X's overall value dropped approximately 80% from Musk's $44 billion purchase price.

Despite Musk's free speech positioning, data showed X complied at least partially with 98.8% of government takedown requests from October 2022 to April 2023. Government requests more than doubled from 348 to 971 compared to the same period a year earlier, with Turkey responsible for half of all requests, followed by Germany and India. The company blocked content in Turkey prior to the May 2023 presidential election. Musk stated 'Twitter doesn't have a choice but to obey local governments' when confronted with the data, though X took the opposite stance in Brazil, refusing a court order and being temporarily banned.

Despite Musk declaring child safety his 'top priority' after acquiring Twitter, independent investigations found the situation worsened. X disbanded its Trust and Safety Council (which included 12 groups advising on child exploitation), and nonprofit Thorn terminated its contract with X after the company stopped paying invoices. A February 2023 NYT investigation found CSAM was easy to find and X was slower to action reports. NBC News found in 2025 that automated accounts were flooding hashtags with child exploitation content using the same methods identified in 2023, indicating persistent failure to address the problem.

Starting December 2, 2022, X under Musk released a series of internal documents known as the 'Twitter Files' through selected journalists. The releases detailed how Twitter had received and sometimes complied with content moderation requests from U.S. government agencies. While Musk framed these as exposing government censorship, Twitter's own attorneys stated in a June 2023 court filing that the files did not show government coercion, and media analysts noted the documents largely showed typical content moderation challenges. Former employees noted Republican officials also made frequent takedown requests.

X expanded Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) to all users globally in late 2022, allowing contributors to add context to potentially misleading posts. The system uses an open-source algorithm to surface notes that earn consensus across users with different viewpoints. By November 2023, the program had approximately 133,000 contributors and notes received tens of millions of views daily. A May 2024 study found COVID-19 vaccine notes were accurate 97% of the time.

Following Musk's acquisition, X reinstated numerous accounts that had been banned for violating platform rules. Donald Trump's account was reinstated November 19, 2022 via a Twitter poll. On November 24, 2022, Musk announced a 'general amnesty' for suspended accounts based on a poll where 72% voted in favor. Alex Jones, banned in 2018 for abusive behavior related to Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, was reinstated December 10, 2023. Andrew Tate, banned for misogynistic content, was also reinstated. A BBC study found that a third of 1,100 reinstated accounts appeared to have violated Twitter guidelines.

Following Elon Musk's October 2022 acquisition, X Corp (formerly Twitter) cut 80% of safety engineers (from 279 to 55), eliminated the entire 150-person curation team, and dissolved the Trust and Safety Council of 100 civil rights organizations. The head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth resigned after two weeks under Musk; his successor Ella Irwin lasted 7 months. Multiple Trust & Safety heads have since departed citing conflicts with Musk's decisions.

Since Musk's takeover, X removed policies on crisis misinformation, COVID-19 misleading information, election outcome misinformation, and transgender protections (misgendering/deadnaming). The platform reinstated previously banned accounts including Trump's (suspended after Jan 6). Gizmodo reported the transgender protection policy became 'effectively dead' after Musk relaxed hate speech policies in November 2022.

Multiple studies documented sustained increases in hate speech following Musk's takeover. Anti-Black slurs tripled from 1,282 to 3,876/day, antisemitic posts rose 61% in two weeks, and anti-LGBTQ 'grooming' content increased 119%. A UC Berkeley study published in PLOS One confirmed the 50% hate speech increase persisted through at least May 2023, contradicting X's claims that hate speech decreased.

On July 6, 2020, Twitter announced it had 'suspended processing any requests from Hong Kong authorities' following the National Security Law's passage. Twitter's decision was part of a coordinated stand by major tech platforms refusing to comply with data requests that could be used to identify and prosecute pro-democracy activists. Twitter had historically been a key platform for Hong Kong protest organizing and had previously resisted Chinese government censorship demands.