ONLINE HATE SPEECH INCREASES

Social media giant Facebook on Tuesday released its biannual Community Standards Enforcement Report, which showed an uptick in posts removed for promoting hate speech and violence.

On the main Facebook site, the company said that it removed 9.6 million pieces of content that contained hate speech in the first quarter of 2020, up from 5.7 million during the fourth quarter of 2019.

Facebook removed around 4.7 million pieces of content originating from organized hate groups in the first months of 2020, an increase of more than 3 million from the last quarter of 2019.

While the amount of problematic content increased, the company said that it increased its “proactive detection rate” for both Facebook and Instagram.

“We increased our proactive detection rate for organized hate, the percentage of content we remove that we detect before someone reports it to us, from 89.6% in Q4 2019 to 96.7% in Q1 2020,” Facebook said in a statement about the report.

“We saw similar progress on Instagram where our proactive detection rate increased from 57.6% to 68.9%, and we removed 175,000 pieces of content in Q1 2020, up from 139,800 the previous quarter,” the company said.