Facebook Removed 20M+ Pieces of Content in Q2 for Covid-19 Misinformation

More than 20 million pieces of content were removed from Facebook and Instagram worldwide during the second quarter of 2021 for violating its policies on Covid-19 misinformation, the social network said in its Community Standards Enforcement Report for the period, which was released Wednesday. Over 3,000 accounts, groups and pages were removed for repeatedly violating Facebook’s rules against spreading Covid-19 and vaccine misinformation, while warnings were displayed on more than 190 million pieces of content that the social network’s third-party fact-checking partners rated as false, partly false, altered or missing context. However, the real damage is caused by the content that isn’t detected and removed, and the large numbers in the company’s quarterly report lack some context that would add more clarity. Facebook provides data on prevalence for types of content such as adult nudity and hate speech, but it does not do so for Covid-19 misinformation. When Facebook released its Community Standards Enforcement Report for the first quarter of 2021 in May, vice president of integrity Guy Rosen called prevalence “one of the most useful metrics for understanding how often people see harmful content on our platform.” When asked why this data was not available for Covid-19 misinformation during a press call Wednesday, Rosen called the topic more complex, saying, "When it comes to Covid, though, things are evolving even more quickly, so it does make prevalence even more difficult to define and measure. There will always be examples of things we missed and, with a scale of our enforcement, there will be examples of things that we take down by mistake. There is no perfect here.” He then changed the focus to Facebook’s efforts to promote vaccine acceptance, saying that 2 billion people were connected to resources from health experts via the Coronavirus (Covid-19) Information Center on Facebook and Instagram, and 4 million people in the U.S. alone were helped in accessing vaccines through the social network’s vaccine finder tool. Facebook said more than 18 million people worldwide have used Facebook profile frames promoting vaccines, while the UNICEF Covid-19 vaccine profile frames have been seen by over 25% of its users worldwide, and more than 29% of Instagram users globally have seen a Covid-19 vaccine sticker, as they have been used by over 7.6 million people worldwide. Other data from the second-quarter-2021 Community Standards Enforcement Report highlighted in a Newsroom post by Rosen Wednesday included: The prevalence of hate speech has gone down for three consecutive quarters for the first time since Facebook began reporting it, due to improvements in proactively detecting hate speech and ranking changes in News Feed.The removal of hate speech content from Facebook and Instagram is up by more than 15 times since Facebook first began reporting it.The company’s proactive rate—the percentage of content it took action on before a user reported it—topped 90% for 12 of the 13 policy areas covered on Facebook and nine out of the 11 on Instagram.Child nudity and physical abuse content: Facebook took action on 2.3 million pieces, with a proactive rate over 97%, while Instagram did so on 458,000 pieces with a proactive rate of over 95%.Child sexual exploitation content: Facebook took action on 25.7 million pieces with a proactive rate of over 99%, while Instagram did so on 1.4 million with a proactive rate of over 96%. Rosen wrote, “In the second quarter of 2021, we improved our proactive detection technology on videos and expanded our media-matching technology on Facebook, allowing us to remove more old, violating content. Both enabled us to take action on more violating content.”Organized hate content: Facebook took action on 6.2 million pieces, down from 9.8 million in the first quarter, while Instagram did so on 367,000, up from 325,000.Suicide and self-injury content: Facebook took action on 16.8 million pieces of content in the second quarter, up drastically from 5.1 million in the previous period, while Instagram did so on 3 million, up from 2.6 million.Violent and graphic content: Facebook took action on 34.1 million pieces of content, up from 30.1 million in the first quarter, while Instagram did so on 7.6 million and 5.5 million, respectively. Facebook vice president of content policy Monika Bickert also took the time to address a recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which attributed 73% of online vaccine misinformation on Facebook to 12 people. Bickert wrote in a Newsroom post Wednesday, “There isn’t any evidence to support this claim. Moreover, focusing on such a small group of people distracts from the complex challenges we all face in addressing misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.” She said more than three-dozen accounts (Facebook and Instagram), groups and pages linked to those 12 people have been removed, with penalties imposed on nearly two-dozen additional accounts, groups and pages, as well as some of their website domains. Bickert claimed that the report only analyzed 483 pieces of content over six weeks from 30 groups, some of which had as few as 2,500 members, writing, “Focusing on these 12 individuals misses the forest for the trees.”

Coronavirus

Facebook Removed 20M+ Pieces of Content in Q2 for Covid-19 Misinformation

The company released its quarterly Community Standards Enforcement Report

David Cohen

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David Cohen