A lot of tech executives had to face intense questioning during the Senate Judiciary Committee's child safety hearing, one of which is X CEO Linda Yaccarino. In an attempt to lessen the heat towards the social media site, the executive claims that only under 1% of X users are teens.
X's Teen User Base
Along with other social media platforms being interrogated for their child safety practices, Linda Yaccarino tries to paint the issue as something minor by stating that of the 90 million US users active on X (formerly Twitter), only a very small fraction is between 13 to 17 years old.
The problem is that this isn't the first time that X was associated with the violation of child safety protocols. It has gotten the attention of the EU and Australia when it failed to address the issues on the platform by blocking child sex abuse materials (CSAM).
It has been a growing problem even before Elon Musk acquired the company, and he just happened to have inherited the problem. The issue was that even after purchasing the social media site, the issue was still rampant.
The X CEO is distancing the rebranded company from what it once was by calling it a 14-month-old company, as reported by Tech Crunch, with Yaccarino saying that it has since prioritized child protection and safety measures.
According to her statement, the company is already talking about and discussing ways that child safety measures can be enhanced within the social media site, with one of the solutions being the addition of parental controls.
In addition to that, the company shared statistics that support the company's progress when it comes to child safety. Compared to its 2022 stats of 2.3 million accounts removed for exploiting minors, 2023 saw 12.4 million suspended accounts for CSE.
The company proudly announced that it has sent around 850,000 reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), which is eight times more than Twitter did before Elon Musk acquired the company.
A Drop in User Count
With all the chaos surrounding child safety on X, it's easy to miss the total number of US users that the platform has. Yaccarino mentioned that there were 90 million users, which is a decline from the estimated number of users back in January 2023 at 95.4 million.
Back in late October 2023, it was reported that X lost almost 15% of its users just one year after Musk bought the platform. This is likely due to all the changes that have been implemented on the platform, including its moderation practices.
When Musk first took on the role of Twitter CEO, there was an increase in slurs that were published on the platform, which prompted advertisers to leave the service, and everything has gone downhill since then.
The most recent blunder that the tech billionaire made was agreeing to an antisemitic post on X, which was the last straw for some of his remaining advertisers including Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Microsoft, IBM, and many more.
