Meta ha doubled the number of violent content removed from Facebook in the first quarter of 2022 compared to the same period last year. If in fact twelve months ago there were 12.4 million violent videos and messages, this year in three months they rise to 21.7 million. These data come after the protests for the recent Buffalo shooting: the videos of the violent act circulated on social networks for a long time before being removed.
Meta eliminates twice as much violent content from Facebook as last year
The moderation of content on social media is an important topic, so much so that Meta has decided in the last period to be as transparent as possible in this regard. The company then revealed that deleted posts doubled compared to 2021 on Facebook. Also on Instagram they increase, but much less: 2.7 million against 2.6 million last year.
Meta explained the increase in the number of removed content with the improvement of “pro-active recognition technologies “. In fact beyond the 98% of contents are removed before user reports.
The report comes after the criticism of the social network for the management of the videos on the recent shooting at Buffalo, in the state of New York. In fact, the videos of the shooting circulated on the platform for a long time before being stopped. One video in particular has reached altitude 46 thousand shares before removal, hours after publication according to the Washington Post.
The speed with which users downloaded and made copies of the videos is reminiscent of what they saw after the Christchurch shooting, where Facebook was heavily criticized. The VP of Facebook Guy Rosen explained: “One of the challenges we see with events like this is that the people create new content, new versions, new external links to evade our controls “. But he assures that Facebook is also improving this process.
Meta also shared data on incorrect removals: put it back online 756 thousand posts. The company has explained that it wants to reduce this number as much as possible, but has not explained in detail how it intends to do so.