Facebook has again responded to criticism of its platform. Previously, Facebook was accused of deliberately allowing hate speech content to exist for profit.
This was revealed by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, she also said that Facebook was using its algorithm to generate a lot of hate speech content that users liked.
However, Facebook says hate speech content has dropped dramatically in just three months.
Facebook claims a nearly 50% decline in prevalence over the last few quarters. Hate speech only accounts for about 0.05% of the content users view. This means only about 5 accounts view for every 10,000 user accounts.
Facebook itself focuses on the prevalence of hate speech described as content users actually see rather than the total number of problematic content found on its platform.
The platform created by Mark Zuckerberg also said it proactively uses various technologies to detect problematic content and sends it to verifiers or those who review the content for later removal.
The statement came from Facebook VP of Integrity Guy Rosen who specifically raised the news regarding the release of leaked content by The Wall Street Journal.
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He said the leaked documents were used to create technology that would combat hate speech.
We don't want to see hate on our platform, nor do our users or advertisers, and we are transparent about our work to remove it. What these documents show is that our integrity work is a multi-year journey. While we will never be perfect, our team is constantly working to develop our systems, identify problems, and build solutions.
He also added that the prevalence of hate speech on the Facebook platform was the most important metric. It specifically mentions a high threshold for auto-deleting content.
"We have a high threshold for automatically removing content. Otherwise, we risk making more mistakes on content that looks like hate speech but isn't, harming the people we're trying to protect, such as those who describe experiences with hate speech or condemn it ," he said
