Meta Releases Q4 2021 Community Standards Enforcement Report, Widely Viewed Content Report

Meta released its Community Standards Enforcement Report for the fourth quarter of 2021 Tuesday, saying that the prevalence of harmful content on Facebook and Instagram remained relatively consistent or decreased in certain policy areas compared with the third quarter, meaning that the “vast majority” of content on those platforms does not violate its policies. During a press call Tuesday, president of global affairs Nick Clegg detailed some of the measures Meta is taking to keep people in Russia and Ukraine safe, sharing that 10% of people in Europe and 4% globally have at least one Facebook friend in Ukraine. Vice president of integrity Guy Rosen said in a Newsroom post, “We’re always trying to identify policies we may be under- or over-enforcing so that we can improve,” using Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 2020 as an example. He noted that there was an influx of breast cancer-related content on Instagram in October 2020, with many images containing adult nudity that was medical in nature, adding that there were many instances of content being taken down, despite not violating the company’s policies, due to its systems incorrectly enforcing those policies. Rosen explained, “Since then, we’ve been working to improve the accuracy of enforcement on health content, including content related to breast cancer and surgeries. We defined and clarified our exception for medical nudity by training our artificial intelligence systems to better recognize exposed chests with mastectomy scars and escalating content flagged as medical nudity for human review to further improve accuracy. We also send content with frequently used keywords for human review. Finally, we trained our systems to better recognize benign and non-violating images and avoid overenforcement in the future. As a result, we saw significantly less overenforcement during last year’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which empowered our community to share content openly.” Meta also released its Widely Viewed Content Report for the fourth quarter Tuesday, offering a look at the most-viewed domains, links, pages and posts in Feed in the U.S. during the period. The company said news domains accounted for roughly 0.4% of all Feed content views, up from 0.3% in the third quarter, while 14.6% of Feed content views were on posts with links, up from 13.5%. The top 20 domains collectively accounted for about 2.1% of all Feed content views in the U.S. during the fourth quarter, up slightly from roughly 2% in the previous period. The 20 most-viewed domains during the fourth quarter were: YouTube, 184.2 millionTikTok, 139.7 millionGoFundMe, 127 millionAmazon, 123.2 millionTenor, 122.2 millionTwitter, 114 millionLinktree, 92.4 millionSpotify, 90.2 millionNBC News, 86.8 millionCNN, 86.5 millionDaily Mail, 86.4 millionEtsy, 84.5 millionABC News, 82.5 millionEventbrite, 74.9 millionGoogle, 74.5 millionRanker, 73.8 millionChange.org, 73.3 millionCBS News, 72.5 millionNew York Post, 68.4 millionFox News, 67.9 million Meta said the top 20 links collectively accounted for approximately 0.1% of Feed content views in the U.S. during the fourth quarter, unchanged from the third quarter. The top five links were: https://www.tiktok.com/@thataintrightofficial/video/7032866424154590510, 59.1 millionhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfLM_-EbjLPaP7BKMcLBEuw, 56.2 millionhttps://stevefmvirginia.iheart.com/, 52.2 millionhttps://www.tiktok.com/@thataintrightofficial/video/7036788676420013358, 46.8 millionhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-PbtZBWZUGcT7LY28xr8fw, 38.6 million The top 20 pages collectively accounted for about 1.1% of all U.S. content views during the period, up slightly from 1% in the last report. The majority of the pages were related to lifestyle and entertainment. The top page on the list, with 121.8 million views, was removed for violating Facebook’s community standards, and Rosen said during the press call that the company could not provide further information in order to protect the privacy of people who may have been affected by those violations. The top five was rounded out by Thinkarete (110 million), WomenWorking.com (102.2 million), Do You Remember When (98.7 million) and Newsner (95,5 million). Finally, the top 20 posts collectively accounted for about 0.1% of all U.S. content views during the fourth quarter, unchanged from the previous quarter. They were mostly related to entertainment and humor. The most-viewed post during the fourth quarter tallied 92.3 million views. Back to the Community Standards Enforcement Report, Rosen credited improvements to the company’s proactive detection technologies in saying that Facebook took action on 4 million pieces of drug content in the fourth quarter of 2021, up from 2.7 million in the third quarter, and on 1.5 million pieces of firearm-related content, up from 1.1 million. He also noted that a heavy volume of removals in December contributed to Facebook’s total of 1.2 billion pieces of spam content removed during the period, up from 777 million. Similarly, on Instagram, Rosen said improvements to Meta’s proactive detection technologies helped boost removals of pieces of content related to terrorism to 905,000, up from 685,000 in the previous report, and removals of pieces of firearm-related content to 195,000, up from 154,000 in the third quarter of last year. The company added prevalence metrics on bullying and harassment for the first time in its third-quarter-2021 report, and for the fourth quarter, Rosen said it remained relatively consistent on Instagram, at 0.05% to 0.06%, and down to 0.11% to 0.12% on Facebook from 0.14% to 0.16% in the previous period. He explained, “The reduction in prevalence was in part due to policy updates accounting for language that, without additional context, could be considered offensive, but in reality, is used in a familiar or joking way between friends.”

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Meta Releases Q4 2021 Community Standards Enforcement Report, Widely Viewed Content Report

The company said the prevalence of harmful content on Facebook and Instagram remained relatively consistent or decreased

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