The Automattic Trust and Safety team’s vision is to maintain safety while democratizing publishing. Earlier this year, we established five pillars that underpin our intent: user rights, safety by design, sustainability, empowerment, and transparency. An open web must be an accountable web!
In our transparency report, we look through the lens of two pillars in particular: user rights and safety by design.
User Rights: Supporting users’ control over their own data
Over the past year, we’ve seen more people exercising their right to access and delete their personal data; we view this as a win for user rights—specifically their ability to control their data. We believe in keeping these options accessible to users rather than hidden away.
On the Tumblr side, we received 3,868 deletion requests and 7,699 access requests, up from 2,820 and 6,504 respectively during the last reporting period. Even with higher volumes, we’ve reduced the average response time for both types of requests, going from nearly 11 hours to under 6 hours, almost doubling our speed.
Meanwhile on the WordPress.com side, those same deletion and access requests remain comparatively few. We received only six access requests this period (up from three last period). Nonetheless, our response times here improved here as well. We went from 24 days to 19 days, on average.
We’re well under the 30-day response time for GDPR requests, and we’re working on decreasing our response times even further. We don’t just look at these as compliance obligations; they offer autonomy to users. Whether a user wants to review the information we hold or remove it entirely, Automattic believes the process should be straightforward, timely, and predictable. As the number of requests increases, we’ve demonstrated that we can move faster without sacrificing care or accuracy for our users.
Safety by Design: Giving users easier pathways to flag harmful content.
We’ve seen a significant increase in Digital Services Act-related reports, specifically on Illegal Content, both on Tumblr and WordPress.com. While WordPress.com shows only 88 reports, this is up from 71 during the last reporting period with Defamation and Intellectual Property reports making up the bulk, at 22 and 16 reports respectively.
But it is on the Tumblr side we see the most interesting numbers, where users have flagged 17% more reports than last period. Granted, these are not large absolute numbers—we had 105 reports in total—but we’ve found that our users are getting better at reporting content accurately. This period, the content they reported on Tumblr as Illegal Content was in violation in some way 76% of the time, up from 56%.
Hate Speech reports more than doubled—from 17 to 40 reports this period. Of these, 75% of reports were actionable as hate speech, 5% more were actionable under other violations, and an additional 5% were actionable via geoblocks (that is, not in violation globally).
Users reported more Terrorism content, and while reports nearly doubled (from 9 reports last period to 16 reports this period), the instances of actual terrorism content was rare. Of these reports, 75% were suspended for other reasons (usually violent content); 25% were not actionable.
Our take is that our users are eager to report violations to us, but we need to do a better job of helping them understand what constitutes different types of violations. Clearly, more education is in order—and empowering users is another one of our five pillars. Stay tuned.
We welcome you to take a look through the data. As always, let us know if you have comments, suggestions, or requests.
Transparency Report 