Facebook increasingly violent: the number of deletions has doubled in one year

The social network is affected by an explosion in the publication of sensitive content in the first quarter of 2022.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has just shared its quarterly report on compliance with its community measures for the first quarter of 2022.

Twice as much violent content on Facebook, almost status quo for Instagram

During this period, the group says it deleted 21.7 million posts containing violent images or videos as well as publications inciting hatred. This is an increase of almost 100% compared to the last quarter of 2021, when Facebook indicated that it had removed 12.4 million of its contents.

Meta explains these high numbers by its automatic removal tools and ” proactive detection “. Indeed, 98% of the content would have been removed from the platform even before it was reported.

On Instagram, things seem more measured. The platform, known for its benevolent content, however saw 2.7 million of its posts removed, but the increase is almost zero compared to the last quarter of 2021 (2.6 million).

At the same time, Meta indicates that it has restored 756,000 Facebook contents deleted in advance by its detection systems and whose authors had sent a complaint.

Meta accused of allowing the video of the Buffalo massacre to proliferate for several hours

The publication of this report comes as Meta, like other social platforms, is accused of delaying the removal of the video of the Buffalo massacre. As a reminder, an 18-year-old young man murdered ten people in a supermarket on Saturday May 14, 2022 and justified his action by the racialist thesis of “great replacement”. He had been live streaming the attack on Twitch for two minutes before Amazon’s service cut off the signal and suspended the account.

Copies of the video circulated on Facebook, and according to information from the washington post, one of which was shared 46,000 times on the social network before the platform removed it. It took nine hours for Facebook to finally delete this copy.

Guy Rosen, Meta’s VP of Integrity, has publicly stated that the platform struggles to moderate such violent content: One of the challenges we see through events like this is that people are creating new content, new versions, new external links to try to evade our policies and their enforcement. At the same time, the group indicates that it is working to improve its tools to more effectively detect this type of content.

Source : Engadget