Facebook Rolls Out Transparency Center, Releases Q1 Community Standards Enforcement Report

Facebook introduced its new Transparency Center Wednesday, billing it as a single destination for information on its integrity and transparency efforts. Resources available via the Transparency Center include: Facebook’s policies and how they are developed and updated.The company’s approach to enforcing content policies by using human reviewers and machine learning technology.Facebook’s efforts to safeguard elections and combat misinformation.Transparency reports containing data and metrics related to those efforts. Facebook said EY will conduct an independent audit to validate that its metrics are correctly measured and reported. The company had committed to this audit last year. Vice president of integrity Guy Rosen shared key data points from Facebook’s Community Standards Enforcement Report for the first quarter of 2021, which covers how the company’s policies were enforced, encompassing 12 policies on Facebook and 10 on Instagram. Rosen called prevalence “one of the most useful metrics for understanding how often people see harmful content on our platform,” and he shared the following results from the first quarter of 2021: Adult nudity: 0.03% to 0.04% on both Facebook and Instagram.Hate speech: 0.05% to 0.06% on Facebook.Violent and graphic content: 0.03% to 0.04% on Facebook, 0.01% to 0.02% on Instagram. Rosen credited advancements in Facebook’s artificial intelligence technology with helping to lower the prevalence numbers for these types of content, saying that when the company first began reporting its hate speech metrics, in the fourth quarter of 2017, its proactive detection rate was 23.6%—meaning that 23.6% of hate speech content was removed before being reported by users—and that number is now up to roughly 97%. He shared metrics on content from other problem areas that Facebook took action on during the first quarter on the flagship platform: 8.8 million pieces of bullying and harassment content, up from 6.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2020, due in part to improvements in proactive detection technology.9.8 million pieces of organized hate content, up from 6.4 million in the previous quarter.25.2 million pieces of hate speech content, down from 26.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2020. And on Instagram: 5.5 million pieces of bullying and harassment content, up from 5 million in the previous quarter.324,500 pieces of organized hate content, up from 308,000 in the fourth quarter of 2020.6.3 million pieces of hate speech content, down from 6.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2020. As for Covid-19, from the beginning of the pandemic through April 2021, over 18 million pieces of content were removed from Facebook and Instagram across the globe for violating the social network’s policies on Covid-19-related misinformation and harm. Facebook director and associate general counsel for intellectual property Mark Fiore shared highlights from the company’s Intellectual Property Transparency Report for the second half of 2020 and an overview of steps being taken to thwart counterfeits and piracy on its platform. Fiore said 99.7% of all counterfeit-related removals on Facebook were done proactively, meaning that 335,765,018 pieces of suspected counterfeit content were removed before being reported by a rights holder, and those figures for Instagram were 82.8% and 2,696,272, respectively. As for copyright removals, 77.9% on Facebook were done proactively, accounting for 9,822,070 pieces of content, and Instagram’s totals were 59% and 2,170,529, respectively. Fiore said Facebook has advanced its protection of intellectual property in several ways, including more robust proactive enforcement systems incorporating machine learning, suspicious signals (prior IP violations, keywords commonly associated with infringement) and direct insights from rights holders. He also pointed to Facebook’s Rights Manager tool, which helps creators identify content that matches their own, and its Commerce & Ads IP tool, which displays potential matches to rights holder instead of leaving it up to them to search for potentially infringing ads. Content on Facebook Shops and Instagram Shops is covered, as well as listings on ecommerce destination Facebook Marketplace and in for-sale groups. Facebook vp and deputy general counsel Chris Sonderby said that during the last six months of 2020, government requests for user data rose 10%, to 191,013 from 173,592 in the first half of last year. The U.S. had the largest number, at 61,262, down less than 1% from the previous period, followed by India, Germany, France, Brazil and the U.K. Increases in requests from the U.K., Turkey and Brazil drove the total number of global content restrictions based on local law to 42,606 in the second half of 2020, up 93% from 22,120 in the first half of the year. Sonderby said Facebook identified 94 disruptions of its services during the last six months of last year, in 19 countries, compared with 52 disruptions in nine countries in the first half of 2020. Finally, director of product management Mike Clark addressed data scraping, which made headlines in April when Business Insider reported that information from over 530 million Facebook users was made publicly available in an unsecured database. Clark said steps Facebook has taken to deal with the issue, which perpetually affects the entire industry, include: Facebook assembled a dedicated external data misuse team of over 100 people focused on detecting, investigating and blocking patters of behavior associated with scraping.Rate and data limits restrict how much data a single person can obtain via a certain feature, with Clark saying billions of scraping actions are blocked each day on Facebook and Instagram.Facebook works with researchers to find and secure publicly accessible datasets that contain user data, regardless of where that data originated from.Over 300 enforcement actions have been taken in the past year against abusive actors, including cease-and-desist letters, disabling accounts, lawsuits or seeking assistance from hosting providers to get them taken down.

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Facebook Rolls Out Transparency Center, Releases Q1 Community Standards Enforcement Report

The social network also shared details on intellectual property, government requests for information, data scraping

David Cohen

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David Cohen