E-Paper
Have seen drop in hate speech content, says Facebook
“Last quarter, we shared the prevalence of hate speech on Facebook for the first time to show the percentage of times people see this type of content on our platform. This quarter, hate speech prevalence dropped from 0.10-0.11% to 0.07-0.08%,” the company said.
The prevalence of hate speech on Facebook has dropped compared to the last quarter, the social media company said in its fourth quarter enforcement report released on Thursday.
“Last quarter, we shared the prevalence of hate speech on Facebook for the first time to show the percentage of times people see this type of content on our platform. This quarter, hate speech prevalence dropped from 0.10-0.11% to 0.07-0.08%,” the company said.
This implies that for every 10,000 posts there were seven to eight views of hate speech. Further, the prevalence of violent and graphic content also dropped from “0.07% to 0.05% and adult nudity content dropped from 0.05-0.06% to 0.03-0.04%”. The social media company added that it also took down 6.4 million pieces of organized hate content, up from 4 million in the last quarter and 26.9 million pieces of hate speech content, up from 22.1 million.
According to the company’s policy prevalence estimates the percentage of times people see violating content on the platform. “It is calculated by selecting a sample of content seen on Facebook and labelling how much of it violates our hate speech policies”.
“Because hate speech depends on language and cultural context, we send these representative samples to reviewers across different languages and regions. Based on this methodology, we estimated the prevalence of hate speech from July 2020 to September 2020 was 0.10% to 0.11%. In other words, out of every 10,000 views of content on Facebook, 10 to 11 of them included hate speech,” the company’s said.
Facebook has been charged with allowing hate speech to flow freely on its platform. Facebook officials on September 2 met the Indian parliamentary panel on information technology to discuss alleged political bias shown by the company, following reports that its executives intervened to shield Bharatiya Janata Party leaders from action for spreading hate speech.
The company said that the improvements were mainly due to changes made to reduce problematic content. “Each post is ranked by processes that take into account a combination of integrity signals, such as how likely a piece of content is to violate our policies, as well as signals we receive from people, such as from surveys or actions they take on our platform like hiding or reporting posts,” Facebook said.
In areas of bullying and harassment, Facebook said that its proactive rate of action went up from 26% in Q3 to 49% in Q4 on Facebook, and 55% to 80% on Instagram. “Improvements to our AI in areas where nuance and context are essential, such as hate speech or bullying and harassment, helped us better scale our efforts to keep people safe,” Facebook said.
Facebook’s report corresponded to the calendar year 2020, which meant the latest data is from the October-December period.
The company added that 6.3 million pieces of bullying and harassment content were taken down, up from 3.5 million in Q3, while 2.5 million pieces of suicide and self-injury content were removed, up from 1.3 million in Q3 due to increased reviewer capacity.
On Instagram, 5 million pieces of bullying and harassment content, 308,000 pieces of organized hate content, 6.6 million pieces of hate speech content, and 3.4 million pieces of suicide and self-injury content, were removed due to increased reviewer capacity.
“This year, we plan to share additional metrics on Instagram and add new policy categories on Facebook. Our goal is to lead the technology industry in transparency, and we’ll continue to share more enforcement metrics as part of this effort,” the company said. “We also believe that no company should grade its own homework. Last year, we committed to undertaking an independent, third-party audit of our content moderation systems to validate the numbers we publish, and we’ll begin this process this year.”
