As the 2024 election approaches, Instagram has failed to remove malicious comments targeting Vice President Kamala Harris and other leading female politicians from its app, according to research from the Center to Counter Digital Hate.
The nonprofit is analyzing large online platforms to see if they are properly monitoring hate speech on their sites. Wednesday’s report is based on an analysis of 560,000 comments on Instagram posts with high levels of engagement from five Republican and five Democratic female politicians.
Politicians tracked by the organization include current Democratic presidential candidate Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) 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 found more than 20,000 comments deemed “toxic.” Google’s Perspective AI content moderation tool. CCDH chief executive Imran Ahmed told a media briefing on Tuesday that researchers then conducted manual analysis and found 1,000 comments that “clearly violated Instagram’s terms.”
“Our recommendations can be summed up quite simply that Instagram must implement policies designed to protect women in public life,” Ahmed told a news conference. “Organizations need to do a better job of supporting female candidates who have experienced abuse, and provide them with best practices for dealing with this situation on a regular basis.”
Instagram parent company Meta has been repeatedly criticized by lawmakers for failing to address the spread of hateful content across its family of apps and for its inability or unwillingness to crack down on harmful behavior. New Mexico’s attorney general claims in an ongoing lawsuit against Meta that the company failed to protect underage users from predators and sexual exploitation.
In previous election cycles, Facebook has also been a hub for the spread of misinformation and toxic content targeting political candidates.
According to the report, some of the problematic comments captured by CCDH included “legalize rape” and “we don’t want black people around us, no matter who they are.” One comment directed at Harris mocked her racial background, while another called on President Joe Biden to sexually assault her.
CCDH researchers then used Instagram’s own content reporting tool to flag the 1,000 offensive comments it manually discovered. A week later, “Instagram had taken no action against 926 of those people, or 93% of them,” the report said.
Yuan In a statement, it said the examples highlighted by CCDH would be reviewed and comments that violated the company’s policies would be removed, but added that some content may be offensive but does not violate its rules. The company also said that Google artificial intelligence tools that CCDH relies on for some of its research are not always accurate.
Cindy Southworth, Meta’s director of women’s safety, said: “We provide tools that allow anyone to control who can comment on their posts, automatically filtering out offensive comments, phrases or emojis, and automatically hiding comments from those who don’t follow them. “We work with hundreds of security partners around the world to continually improve our policies, tools, detection and enforcement, and we will review CCDH reports and take action on any content that violates our policies. “
According to the report, a CCDH researcher eventually received an Instagram notification regarding the racist remarks against Harris, stating that the post “does not violate our community standards.” The report also said that more than a fifth of the 1,000 offensive comments flagged by the researchers came from “repeat offenders” who had posted at least two abusive comments.
The report on Instagram comes months after a California federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X against CCDH. It was filed shortly after hate speech increased.
Ahmed said that with all the negative attention directed toward Musk, Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have escaped scrutiny recently, and the perception is that Instagram “has become a platform that people feel safe using.”
“Mark Zuckerberg has adopted a strategy of keeping a low profile, while See if they actually back up their gloating about X’s misfortune with their actions.”
watch: Stephen Knight’s Trump/Musk interview.
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