Facebook acts on hate speech
Facebook said it’s making progress on detecting hate speech, graphic violence and other violations of its rules, even before users see and report them.
Facebook said that during the April-to-September period, it doubled the amount of hate speech it detected proactively, compared with the previous six months.
The findings were spelled out this week in Facebook’s second report on enforcing community standards. The reports come as Facebook grapples with challenge after challenge, ranging from fake news to Facebook’s role in elections interference, hate speech and incitement to violence in the United States, Myanmar, India and elsewhere.
The company also said it disabled more than 1.5 billion fake accounts in the latest six-month period, compared with 1.3 billion during the previous six months.
Facebook said most of the fake accounts it found were financially motivated, rather than aimed at misinformation. The company has close to 2.3 billion users.
Facebook’s report comes after The New York Times recently published an extensive report on how Facebook has dealt with crisis after crisis over the past two years. The Times described Facebook’s strategy as ‘‘delay, deny and deflect’’.
Facebook said this week it has cut ties with a Washington public relations firm, Definers, which the Times said Facebook hired to discredit opponents.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said during a call with reporters that he learned about the company’s relationship with Definers only when he read the Times report.
On community guidelines, Facebook also released metrics on issues such as child nudity and sexual exploitation, terrorist propaganda, bullying, and spam.
While it is publishing how many violations it is catching, the company said it can’t always reliably measure how prevalent these things are, overall, on Facebook.
For instance, while Facebook took action on two million instances of bullying in the JulySeptember period, this does not mean there were only two million instances of bullying during this time. – AP