Meta Grilled on Delays in Taking Down Buffalo Shooting Videos

Meta shared its Community Standards Enforcement Report for the first quarter of 2022 Tuesday, covering enforcement of 14 policy areas on Facebook and 12 on Instagram from January through March, but its handling of the livestream and subsequent shared videos of the tragic shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., this past weekend took center stage during a press call Tuesday. Vice president of integrity Guy Rosen called it a “horrific incident” and said that as soon as his team became aware of the event last Saturday, it was designated as a violating terrorist attack, and the process began of removing any copies of the video of the shooting, as well as the racist manifesto penned by the shooter and any supportive comments. Meta’s efforts are part of a process with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. Rosen said of reports that multiple copies of the video remained on its platform for hours, “People create new versions and new external links to try to evade our policies. We will continue to learn, refine our processes and refine our systems to ensure that we can take down these links more quickly in the future. It’s only a couple of days after the incident, so we don’t have any more to share at this point.” As for the Community Standards Enforcement Report, the company said the prevalence of violating content on Facebook and Instagram remained relatively consistent compared with the fourth quarter of 2021, with declines in some of the policy areas it covers. Meta said that on Facebook, it took action on 1.8 billion pieces of spam content, up from 1.2 billion in the previous quarter, citing actions “on a small number of users making a large volume of violating posts.” It also took action on 21.7 million pieces of violence and incitement content, up from 12.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2021, crediting improvement and expansion of its proactive detection technology. Those technology improvements were also mentioned for the 1.8 million pieces of drug content on Instagram where action was taken, up from 1.2 million in the previous quarter. Meta said its proactive detection rate of bullying and harassment content rose to 67% from 58.8% in the fourth quarter of 2021. Rosen explained in a Newsroom post Tuesday, “For a long time, our work has focused on measuring and reducing the prevalence of violating content on our services. But we’ve worked just as hard to improve the accuracy of our enforcement decisions. While prevalence helps us measure what we miss, we’ve also been working on developing robust measurements around mistakes, which will help us better understand where we act on content incorrectly. We believe sharing metrics around both prevalence and mistakes will provide a more complete picture of our overall enforcement system and help us improve, so we are committed to providing this in the future.” He added, “Finally, as new regulations continue to roll out around the globe, we are focused on the obligations they create for us. So, we are adding and refining processes and oversight across many areas of our work. This will enable us to make continued progress on social issues while also meeting our regulatory obligations more effectively.” Meta also published the findings of an independent, third-party assessment of its Community Standards Enforcement Report that it commissioned from EY in August 2020. EY stated that the calculation of the metrics reported in the fourth-quarter-2021 report "have been prepared based on the specified criteria and are fairly stated, in all material respects." Vp and deputy general counsel Chris Sonderby shared details from the company’s Transparency Report for the second half of 2021, also released Tuesday, saying that global government requests for user data rose to 214,777 from 211,055 in the first half of 2021, with the largest number of requests coming from the U.S., followed by India, Germany, France, Brazil and the U.K. Meta received 59,996 requests in the U.S., 6% fewer than in the previous six-month period. Finally, Meta released its Widely Viewed Content Report for the first quarter of 2022, highlighting the most viewed organic content in Feed in the U.S., and excluding advertising content. Head of Facebook integrity Anna Stepanov addressed criticisms over the last report, when information on pieces of content was redacted, writing in a Newsroom post Tuesday, “In this report, there were pieces of content that have since been removed from Facebook for violating our policies of inauthentic behavior. The removed links were all from the same domain, and links to that domain are no longer allowed on Facebook. During the last reporting cycle, we took seriously the feedback criticizing our approach to disclosing additional details about the content removed from Facebook that appears in this report. We have updated our removal disclosure framework in the report and companion guide. We will aim to disclose as much information as possible about removed content, including inauthentic behavior, that appears in the report moving forward. However, in instances where disclosing specific details on removed content would cause harm to our community, we will err on the side of keeping the community safe.” On that note, the top 20 links accounted for about 0.03% of Feed content views in the U.S. during the first quarter, and the top two were both described as blocked links from nayenews24.info that violated Meta’s inauthentic behavior policy by using spam tactics to mislead people and drive them to its website. They tallied 31.6 million and 27.7 million views, respectively. News domains accounted for roughly 0.6% of all Feed content views in the U.S., and the top 20 domains were behind about 1.2%. The top five were: YouTube, 168.1 millionTenor, 118.4 millionGoFundMe, 112.4 millionTikTok 105 millionDailymotion, 86.2 million The top 20 pages accounted for approximately 0.9% of all content views in the U.S. during the first quarter, down from 1.1% in the fourth quarter of 2021, and the top five were: LADBible Australia, 105.4 millionThe Dodo, 97.2 millionWoof Woof, 93 millionRyan Engel, 90.8 millionUnilad, 89.2 million Finally, the top 20 posts accounted for roughly 0.1% of all U.S. content views during the period, unchanged from the fourth quarter of 2021. The top post, with 68.2 million views, was:

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Meta Grilled on Delays in Taking Down Buffalo Shooting Videos

The company released its latest Community Standards Enforcement Report, Transparency Report, Widely Viewed Content Report

David Cohen

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