Facebook Removes Record Number Of Hate Speech Posts [Infographic]

On Tuesday, Facebook released its biannual Community Standards Enforcement Report which provided the latest metrics on the number of controversial posts removed from the platform. The company took action against more than 2 billion pieces of content violating its community standards between January and March 2020 and an upsurge in content promoting hate and violence was particularly noteworthy.

Facebook deleted a record number of hate speech posts with 9.6 million taken down compared to 5.7 million in the prior period. That marks a six-fold increase in hateful content removals compared with the second half of 2017, the earliest point for which data is available. The company removed 4.7 million pieces of content originating from organized hate groups in the first three months of 2020, an increase of more than 3 million on the final quarter of last year.

Facebook has attributed the sharp increase in hate speech removals to technology improvements for automatically identifying images and text. In a statement, the company said that “we’re now able to detect text embedded in images and videos in order to understand its full context, and we’ve built media matching technology to find content that’s identical or near-identical to photos, videos, text and even audio that we’ve already removed.” According to the latest data , 88.3% of all hate speech content was removed before users reported it in Q1.

*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)