January recorded lesser user grievances as per a majority of transparency reports released by various social media platforms. Twitter, WhatsApp and Google reported lesser grievances but Instagram reported an onslaught of complaints. Meanwhile, Facebook is still grappling with some issues of spamming. To know the skinny on platform actions so far, here’s MediaNama’s wrap-up of these reports for January, 2023 (and also February, 2023 in Twitter’s case): Twitter focuses on defamation grievances After increased numbers in the previous month, Twitter has reported lower number of grievances between January and February. Additionally, the focus of these complaints have also shifted to issues like defamation rather than hateful conduct. Period: January 26, 2023 to February 25, 2023 As per the transparency report, Twitter received 73 grievances overall in January, 21 grievances regarding hateful conduct, 14 grievances related to abuse harassment, and 12 IP-related infringement grievances. Twitter took action against 249 cases relating to defamation in the latest report as opposed to 163 URLs related to abuse/ harassment in the previous report. Overall, Twitter took action against 302 URLs between January and February 2023. Twitter also processed 27 grievances appealing Twitter account suspensions. After looking into these cases, the platform overturned 10 account suspensions. Instagram complaints continue to spike Instagram reported a huge spike in the number of complaints in December 2022 compared to November 2022. This sharp upward trend has persisted for the first month of 2023 as well, with an increase of around 9,000 complaints. Period: January 1, 2023 to January…
