Instagram failed to remove toxic comments targeting Vice President Kamala Harris and other top female politicians from its app as the 2024 election approaches, according to research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
The nonprofit is analyzing major internet platforms to see if they are properly monitoring their sites for hate speech. Wednesday’s report was based on an analysis of 560,000 comments on Instagram posts from five highly engaged Republicans and five highly engaged Democrats.
Politicians the group tracks include Harris, who is now a Democratic presidential candidate, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) as well as Republican House members Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
Among comments posted between January 1 and June 7, researchers identified more than 20,000 comments deemed “toxic” by of Google AI content moderation tool based on perspective. Researchers then conducted a manual analysis and found 1,000 comments that “clearly violated Instagram’s terms,” CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed said in a press conference on Tuesday.
“Our recommendations can be summed up quite simply as Instagram must implement policies designed to protect women in public life,” Ahmed said in a press release. “Organizations need to be better equipped to support female candidates who are experiencing abuse and provide them with best practices for addressing this issue on a regular basis.”
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has been repeatedly criticized by lawmakers for failing to address the spread of hateful content across its apps and for being unable or unwilling to crack down on harmful content. behavior. The New Mexico attorney general has alleged in an ongoing investigation litigation against Meta for failing to protect minors from sexual predators and exploiters.
In previous elections, Facebook has also been a hotbed for misinformation and harmful content targeting political candidates.
Some of the problematic comments recorded by CCDH included statements such as “legalize rape” and “we don’t want black people around us no matter who they are,” the report said. One comment aimed at Harris mocked her racial background, while another called for her to be sexually assaulted. President Joe Biden.
CCDH researchers then used Instagram’s content reporting tools to flag 1,000 of the offensive comments they found manually. A week later, “Instagram took no action on 926 of them, which equates to inaction on 93% of them,” the report said.
Metadata said in a statement that it would review the examples CCDH highlighted and remove comments that violated the company’s policies, but added that some content may be offensive but does not violate the company’s rules. The company also said that Google’s AI tool that CCDH relied on for part of its research was not always accurate.
“We provide tools for anyone to control who can comment on their posts, automatically filter 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 review CCDH reports and take action on any content that violates our policies.”
Regarding the racist comment directed at Harris, one of the CCDH researchers eventually received a notification on Instagram stating that the post “did not violate our Community Guidelines,” the report said. The report also said that more than a fifth of the 1,000 offensive comments the researchers flagged came from “‘repeat offenders’ who had posted abusive content at least twice.”
The Instagram report comes months after a California federal judge fired One litigation against CCDH by Elon Musk’s X. The lawsuit was filed shortly after the group released research showing an increase in hate speech following Musk’s acquisition of the site formerly known as Twitter.
Ahmed said that because of all the negative attention focused on Musk, Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have escaped recent scrutiny and have taken the view that Instagram “has become a platform that people feel safe” using.
“Mark Zuckerberg “They’ve taken a bow-and-desist strategy while X has been acting as a lightning rod for a lot of anger about toxicity in public life and political discourse,” Ahmed said. “We wanted to look at that platform specifically to see if they were actually backing up some of their gloating about X’s misfortunes with their own actions.”
CLOCK: Stef Knight talks about the interview between Trump and Musk.
