Facebook has announced that the company has recently allowed almost 50 percent fewer hate comments and hate speech, so-called hate speech, in its social network. According to the latest own surveys, such posts made up only 0.05 percent of all content on Facebook.
Only 0.05 percent of all content are hateful
The company claims to have reduced the “visibility” of hate speech by taking appropriate measures within the last three quarters by almost 50 percent. The current figures can be found in the Community Standards Enforcement Report of the Facebook community. The guidelines for this are the in-house Facebook Community Standards and Instagram Community Guidelines.
Between July and September 2020, the proportion of hateful posts on Facebook was 0.10 to 0.11 percent. With the appropriate technologies and monitoring, however, the company has succeeded in proactively detecting hate speech and violations of the terms of use of its social network and removing them more quickly, according to Facebook on its blog.
Messages from users are the exception
In addition, the company stated that people rarely rely on messages from users, but rather try to delete such posts before other users even see them.
According to Facebook, only 5 of 10,000 posts are hateful (Image: Facebook) With regard to the automatic detection of hate posts, Facebook speaks of a “balancing act”, but meanwhile around 97 percent of the hits are correct and do not require subsequent restoration. The company also referred to the Report Of The Facebook Data Transparency Advisory Group (PDF), which was created by external experts in order to ensure the highest possible transparency, according to Facebook.
Update October 18, 2021 5:07 pm
Experts rate internal studies critically
At least internal Facebook studies are generally rated critically by experts. Most recently, the US computer scientist and whistleblower Frances Haugen even said before the US Congress that Facebook ignored the results of internal studies if they were to the detriment of business interests. This also applies to the handling of hate speech.
National Public Radio (NPR), a cooperation of non-commercial radio stations in the US, has the four most important points of the survey by Frances Haugen before the US -Congress summarized in one article.