Facebook have officially released their Community Standards Enforcement Report for October through December 2020. You might be asking yourself, what is that exactly? Well, the Community Standards and Enforcement Report tracks the company’s progress and commitment towards making its platforms (Facebook and Instagram) safe and inclusive.
The report, which is a quarterly feature, shares metrics on how and what Facebook is doing to prevent and take action on content that goes against their current Community Standards while also protecting their community’s safety, privacy, dignity and authenticity.
This installment shows that Facebook has made some positive strides towards improvements in prevalence by not only providing greater transparency but also accountability around content moderation operations across their different products. It includes metrics across 12 policies on Facebook and 10 policies on Instagram.
Delving deeper, during the 4th quarter 2020, Facebook took action on:
- 6.3 million pieces of bullying and harassment content, up from 3.5 million in Q3 due in part to updates in our technology to detect comments
- 6.4 million pieces of organized hate content, up from 4 million in Q3
- 26.9 million pieces of hate speech content, up from 22.1 million in Q3 due in part to updates in our technology in Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese
- 2.5 million pieces of suicide and self-injury content, up from 1.3 million in Q3, due to increased reviewer capacity
When it came to Instagram on the other hand in the same period, Facebook took action on:
- 5 million pieces of bullying and harassment content, up from 2.6 million in Q3 due in part to updates in our technology to detect comments
- 308,000 pieces of organized hate content, up from 224,000 in Q3
- 6.6 million pieces of hate speech content, up from 6.5 million in Q3
- 3.4 million pieces of suicide and self-injury content, up from 1.3 million in Q3 due to increased reviewer capacity
“Our goal is to get better and more efficient at enforcing our Community Standards. We do this by increasing our use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), by prioritizing the content that could cause the most immediate, widespread, and real-world harm, and by coordinating and collaborating with outside experts.”, said Kojo Boakye, Director of Public Policy, Africa.
In addition, the company also confirmed that it plans to share additional metrics on Instagram and add new policy categories on their Facebook platform. To help people better understand the reports, Facebook is currently busy with efforts to externally audit the metrics of the reports.
