Instagram is failing to crack down on hate speech against women politicians as elections near, advocacy group says

Instagram has failed to remove toxic comments directed at Vice President Kamala Harris and other leading female politicians from its app as the 2024 election nears, according to research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The non-profit advocacy is analyzing large internet platforms to see if they’re properly monitoring their sites for hate speech. The report on Wednesday was based on an analysis of 560,000 comments on Instagram posts from five Republican and five Democratic women politicians with high levels of engagement.

The politicians the group tracked included Harris, who’s now the Democratic nominee for president, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) as well as Republican House members Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia and Lauren Boebert from Colorado.

Of the comments posted between Jan. 1 and June 7, the researchers identified over 20,000 that were deemed to be “toxic” by Google’s Perspective AI content moderation tool. The researchers then conducted a manual analysis and discovered 1,000 comments that “clearly breached the terms of Instagram,” said CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed during a media briefing on Tuesday.

“Our recommendations can be summarized quite simply as Instagram must enforce its policies designed to protect women in public life,” Ahmed said during the briefing. “Organizations need to be better equipped to support women candidates experiencing abuse and to give them best practice on dealing with it quite often.”

Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has repeatedly come under fire from 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 behavior. The attorney general of New Mexico has alleged in an ongoing lawsuit against Meta that the company is failing to protect underage users from predators and sexual exploitation.

In prior election cycles, Facebook has also been a hub for the spread of misinformation and toxic content directed at political candidates.

Some of the problematic comments captured by CCDH included statements like “make rape legal” and “we don’t want blacks around us no matter who they are,” the report said. One comment directed at Harris mocked her racial background, while another comment called for her sexual assault by President Joe Biden.

The CCDH researchers then used Instagram’s own content reporting tools to flag the 1,000 offensive comments it manually discovered. A week later, “Instagram had taken no action against 926 of them, equivalent to a failure to act on 93% of them,” the report said.

Meta said in a statement that it would review the examples that CCDH highlighted and will remove comments that violate company policies, but added that some content may be offensive but not in violation of its rules. The company also said that the Google AI tool that CCDH relied on for part of its research isn’t always accurate.

“We provide tools so that anyone can control who can comment on their posts, automatically filter out offensive comments, phrases or emojis, and automatically hide comments from people who don’t follow them,” Cindy Southworth, Meta’s head of women’s safety, said in a statement. “We work with hundreds of safety partners around the world to continually improve our policies, tools, detection and enforcement, and we will review the CCDH report and take action on any content that violates our policies.”

Regarding the racist comment directed at Harris, one of the CCDH researchers eventually received an Instagram notification that said the post “doesn’t go against our Community Guidelines,” the report said. The report also said that over one-fifth of the 1,000 offensive comments that the researchers flagged came from “‘repeat offenders’ who had posted abuse at least twice.”

The report on Instagram comes a few months after a California federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against CCDH by Elon Musk’s X. The suit was filed shortly after the group published research showing an increase of hate speech in the aftermath of Musk’s acquisition of the site formerly known as Twitter.  

Because of all the negative attention that’s flowed in Musk’s direction, Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have escaped scrutiny of late and there’s a perception that Instagram “has become a platform that people feel safe” using, Ahmed said.

“Mark Zuckerberg has played a strategy of keeping his head down while X is acting as a lightning rod for a lot of the anger at the toxicity in public life and political discourse,” Ahmed said. “We wanted to look specifically at that platform to see whether or not they’re actually backing up some of their gloating of X’s misfortunes with action of their own.”

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