Silicon Valley companies used to boast of their openness; today they boast of their censorship.
Facebook has released its quarterly “community standards enforcement report.” In the data, the social network revealed that the prevalence of so-called hate speech on the platform last quarter was 0.05-0.06 percent — half of its prevalence in the third quarter of 2020.
In Facebook’s post summarizing the data, the tech giant also boasted of its use of artificial intelligence to censor so-called hate speech. The company says its AI systems “proactively detect” around 97 percent of hate speech content that is removed by the platform, meaning that most censorship on Facebook is facilitated by machines.
We evaluate the effectiveness of our enforcement by trying to keep the prevalence of hate speech on our platform as low as possible, while minimizing mistakes in the content that we remove. This improvement in prevalence on Facebook is due to changes we made to reduce problematic content in News Feed.
Advancements in AI technologies have allowed us to remove more hate speech from Facebook over time, and find more of it before users report it to us. When we first began reporting our metrics on hate speech in Q4 of 2017, our proactive detection rate was 23.6%. This means that of the hate speech we removed, 23.6% of it was found before a user reported it to us. The remaining majority of it was removed after a user reported it. Today we proactively detect about 97% of hate speech content we remove.
The total amount of content censored on Facebook continues to rise. The report reveals that the social network took action on 9.8 million pieces of “organized hate content,” compared to 6.4 million in the last quarter of 2020. Hate speech removals were down slightly, at 25.2 million pieces of content removed compared to 26.9 million in Q4 2020.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
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