Facebook Saw 82 Percent Rise in Hate Speech, Instagram Registers 86 Percent Jump in Violent Content

There has been a rise of around 82 percent in hate speech on social media platform Facebook and 86 percent jump in violent and inciting content on Instagram, according to a monthly report released by Meta. The majority of the content in the report is based on detection by social media platforms before users reporting to them.

According to the report released on May 31, Facebook detected 53,200 hate speech in April, which is 82 percent higher compared to 38,600 detected in March, on which the platform took action.

The report showed that Instagram acted on 77,000 violence and incitement related content in April compared to 41,300 in March.

“We measure the number of pieces of content (such as posts, photos, videos or comments) we take action on for going against our standards. This metric shows the scale of our enforcement activity. Taking action could include removing a piece of content from Facebook or Instagram or covering photos or videos that may be disturbing to some audiences with a warning,” the report said.

Facebook has been requested on several occasions to curtail hate speech content on the platform. Last month, Nigeria’s Information Minister Lai Mohammed said that the country is monitoring Meta Facebook and other platforms to ensure they comply with demands to curtail hate speech on their sites, as it steps up its campaign for responsible use of social media.

Another report in March this year elaborated on how Facebook failed to detect blatant hate speech and calls to violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority years after such behaviour was found to have played a determining role in the genocide against them.

The report shared exclusively with The Associated Press showed the rights group Global Witness submitted eight paid ads for approval to Facebook, each including different versions of hate speech against Rohingya. All eight ads were approved by Facebook to be published.