Facebook Focusing AI Development on ‘Hate Speech Recognition’ and ‘Harmful Memes’

Facebook has published an article boasting of its advancement in the field of AI, specifically training its advanced systems to detect and remove “hate speech” and “harmful memes.”

In a post earlier this week, the tech giant outlined the steady improvement in its hate speech detection AI tools, boasting that the company’s AI now “proactively detects 88.8 percent of the hate speech content we remove.”

Via Facebook:

We have a responsibility to keep the people on our platforms safe, and dealing with hate speech is one of the most complex and important components of this work. To better protect people, we have AI tools to quickly — and often proactively — detect this content. As noted in the Community Standards Enforcement Report released today, AI now proactively detects 88.8 percent of the hate speech content we remove, up from 80.2 percent the previous quarter. In the first quarter of 2020, we took action on 9.6 million pieces of content for violating our hate speech policies — an increase of 3.9 million.

This progress is due in large part to our recent AI advances in two key areas:

• Developing a deeper semantic understanding of language, so our systems detect more subtle and complex meanings.

• Broadening how our tools understand content, so that our systems look at the image, text, comments, and other elements holistically.

To improve its censorship AI even further, Facebook has announced a $100,000 prize to be awarded to outside researchers that develop the best algorithm for detecting “hateful memes.” The contest will conclude in five months.

“By breaking new ground in research, we hope to make further progress in using AI to detect hate speech, remove it quickly, and keep people safe on our platforms,” said Facebook.