Instagram fails to remove toxic comments targeted Vice President Kamala Harris As the 2024 election approaches, other leading female politicians will also turn to the app for information, according to research from the Center to Counter Digital Hate.
The nonprofit advocacy group is analyzing large online platforms to see if they are properly monitoring hate speech on their sites. Wednesday’s report is based on an analysis of 560,000 comments on Instagram posts with high levels of engagement from five Republican and five Democratic female politicians.
Politicians tracked by the group include current Democratic presidential candidate Harris, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Texas Democratic Rep. Jasmyn Crockett, as well as Georgia’s Republican state and U.S. House of Representatives member Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Among comments posted between January 1 and June 7, researchers found more than 20,000 comments deemed “toxic.” Google’s Perspective AI content moderation tool. Researchers then conducted manual analysis and found 1,000 comments that “clearly violated Instagram’s terms,” CCDH chief executive Imran Ahmed said at a media briefing on Tuesday.
“Our recommendations can be summed up quite simply that Instagram must implement policies designed to protect women in public life,” Ahmed told a news conference. “Organizations need to do a better job of supporting female candidates who have experienced abuse, and provide them with best practices for dealing with this situation on a regular basis.”
Instagram parent company Meta has been repeatedly criticized by lawmakers for failing to address the spread of hateful content across its family of apps and for its inability or unwillingness to crack down on harmful content. Behavior. New Mexico Attorney General claims in an ongoing investigation litigation Meta argued that the company failed to protect underage users from predators and sexual exploitation.
In previous election cycles, Facebook has also been a hub for the spread of misinformation and toxic content targeting political candidates.
According to the report, some of the problematic comments captured by CCDH included “legalize rape” and “we don’t want black people around us, no matter who they are.” One comment directed at Harris mocked her racial background, while another called for her to be sexually assaulted. President Joe Biden.
CCDH researchers then used Instagram’s own content reporting tool to flag the 1,000 offensive comments it manually discovered. A week later, “Instagram had taken no action against 926 of those people, or 93% of them,” the report said.
Yuan In a statement, it said the examples highlighted by CCDH would be reviewed and comments that violated the company’s policies would be removed, but added that some content may be offensive but does not violate its rules. The company also said, citing a Google resource page, that the Google artificial intelligence tools CCDH relies on for some of its research are not always accurate.
Cindy Southworth, Meta’s director of women’s safety, said: “We provide tools that allow anyone to control who can comment on their posts, automatically filtering out offensive comments, phrases or emojis, and automatically hiding comments from those who don’t follow them. “We work with hundreds of security partners around the world to continually improve our policies, tools, detection and enforcement, and we will review CCDH reports and take action on any content that violates our policies. “
According to the report, a CCDH researcher eventually received an Instagram notification regarding the racist remarks against Harris, stating that the post “does not violate our community standards.” The report also said that more than a fifth of the 1,000 offensive comments flagged by the researchers came from “repeat offenders” who had posted abusive content at least twice.
The Instagram story comes months after a California federal judge fired one litigation Oppose CCDH Musk’s X. The lawsuit was filed shortly after the group published research showing an increase in hate speech after Musk acquired the site formerly known as Twitter.
Ahmed said that with all the negative attention directed toward Musk, Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have escaped scrutiny recently, and the perception is that Instagram “has become a platform that people feel safe using.”
“Mark Zuckerberg “When Using their own actions to support their gloating about X’s misfortune.
