Twitter, Inc.
Headquartered in the United States, Twitter is a microblogging and social networking service with an estimated 340 million users worldwide. Twitter also offers targeted advertising services and developer tools.
Twitter once again topped our ranking this year, due primarily to the fact that it has stronger content-related policies than its competitors, and publishes relatively detailed data about actions it takes to moderate content. Twitter offered a good deal of precision in its policies on things like hate speech and disinformation, but it faced routine public criticism for being inconsistent in how it implements these policies, especially outside of major Western markets.
As disinformation and hate speech spread amid the civil conflict in Ethiopia, the company opted to suspend its algorithmically generated Trends feature, which ranks and promotes popular topics. Independent research has shown how powerful actors exploit this feature to wage campaigns of disinformation and abuse. But Twitter has only suspended it in some cases. Civil society advocates voiced concern when the company neglected to take similar measures in response to a scourge of coordinated election disinformation campaigns in neighboring Kenya.
Twitter also made selective choices about when and how to curb harmful speech by heads of state. In the U.S., it permanently suspended the account of then-President Donald Trump following the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. In Nigeria, it removed a single tweet from President Muhammadu Buhari that contained a veiled threat against Igbo people, who represent the third-largest ethnic group in the country. The next day, Twitter was blocked nationwide and remained blocked for several months. In response to the Russian government's invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Twitter temporarily deactivated advertising in the two countries, removed pro-invasion disinformation from its platform, and created a new way for Russians to access Twitter despite a government block.
While Twitter has not been consistent in how it applies its content rules around the world, it reported more data about its content moderation actions (except for data about how it handles ad content) than any other social media platform we evaluate.The company published no data about ad-content rules enforcement, despite the fact that targeted advertising is its primary source of revenue. The company continued efforts to offer more public information about its curation and ranking algorithms, and launched an initiative to prevent racial and gender bias in these systems. Twitter also announced that it was working to make it easier for users to switch to chronological feeds instead of algorithmically curated ones.
Note: On April 25, Twitter accepted a USD $44 billion bid that will give control of the company to tech billionaire Elon Musk. Musk has proposed changes to the platform that include less content moderation, opening up algorithms, eliminating bots, and authenticating users. We will be following Twitter’s evolution closely and will report on changes affecting governance, freedom of expression, and privacy in the next Big Tech Scorecard.
The 2022 Big Tech Scorecard covers policies that were active on November 1, 2021. Policies that came into effect after November 1, 2021, were not evaluated for this ranking.
Scores reflect the average score across the services we evaluated, with each service weighted equally.
We rank companies on their governance, and on their policies and practices affecting freedom of expression and privacy.
Twitter provided no evidence that it conducts human rights due diligence assessing the effects of government regulations on its users (G4a), its enforcement of its own rules (G4b), or its use of targeted advertising (G4c). While it offered users the option to appeal restrictions on their accounts and removals of their tweets, Twitter did not provide sufficient details about its process for responding to such appeals (G6b).
Twitter earned the highest freedom of expression score of all companies in our ranking, primarily due to its policies on rule enforcement (F3, F4) and third-party requests to restrict user content and accounts (F5, F6, F7). Twitter disclosed that it uses algorithms to moderate content and that it provides governments and certain third parties with additional channels to flag “false or misleading information about civic processes” for expedited review (F3a). It clearly described how its algorithmic systems work to curate, rank, and recommend content, but it failed to provide users with sufficient options to control the variables of these systems (F12).
Twitter was transparent about the types of user information it collects and its purposes for collecting this data (P3a, P5). It did not disclose all the types of user information it infers (P3b) and shares (P4), nor did it provide users with sufficient options to control their information (P7). It neglected to publish key information about its security policies and practices, including how it responds to data breaches when they occur (P15) and the details of its encryption methods (P16).