Facebook using AI to track hate speech
Facebook’s hate speech and malicious content identifying AI seem to be working as the company said that their AI identified and removed 134% more hate speech in the second quarter than in the first. The company stated in the Community Standards Enforcement Report that it acted upon 9.9 million hateful posts in the first quarter of the year and 22.5 million in the second. But the figures also reveal how much of hate content was there and is still on the site, to begin with.
Facebook’s VP of Integrity Guy Rosen blames the high number to “the increase in proactive technology” in detecting a said form of content. The company has more and more been relying on machine learning and AI to drive out this type of content by losing bots on the network.
There has been a similar rise on Instagram as well. They detected 84% of hate speeches in this quarter and 45% in the last and removed 3.3 million of these posts from April to June- a sweeping amount when compared to just 808,900 in January till March.
The social media site also has plans to use similar technology to monitor Spanish, Arabic, and Indonesian posts.
These increasing number in hate content does show the platform’s improvement in the AI technology used to fish out hate post but it also raises concerns over the hostile environment the network presents. Though the company blames these numbers to an increase in coverage of content.
“These increases were driven by expanding our proactive detection technologies in English and Spanish,” as the company states.
Some critiques also say that the company has no way of knowing how much percent they are actually capturing and how much there is as they measure it according to ‘Prevalence’ that is how often a Facebook user sees a hateful post as opposed to how many there actually are. The social media giant also updated as to what they include as hate speech – excluding misinformation that remains a big problem for Facebook.
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