HAVE SEEN DROP IN HATE SPEECH CONTENT, SAYS FB

NEW DELHI: 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 organised 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%...,” the company said.

Facebook has been charged with allowing hate speech to flow freely on its platform.