Meta Removes Violent And Incitement Content Doubles In Q1 2022

Facebook is often filled with violent content. (photo: doc. unsplash)

JAKARTA - Meta's social media, including Facebook, are often filled with violent content. Inevitably, during the first quarter (Q1) 2022, the amount of content removed was doubled.

According to the report the company shared, in Q1 2022, Meta removed 21.7 million content for violating its rules around violence and incitement to violence, an increase from 12.4 million in the previous quarter.

There was also 1.8 billion spam content, which is an increase from 1.2 billion in Q4 2021, due to action on a small number of offending users.

Deletions also occurred for this quarter on Instagram, but only slightly. Where Meta removed 2.7 million posts for violating its rules around violence, up from 2.6 million during Q4 2021.

In the report, Meta attributes the increase in content removal to the expansion of proactive detection technology. More than 98 percent of posts have been deleted before users reported them.

"Over the years we've invested in building technology to improve how we detect infringing content. With these advances, we know we're going to make mistakes, so along this path it's also equally important to invest in improving our policies, our enforcement, and the tools we provide to users," said Meta on its official website quoted by VOI, Wednesday, May 18.

The report comes at a time when Meta is facing scrutiny for its response time following the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, United States (US).

Live footage of the shooting spread across Facebook and other platforms, but the company was slow to remove them all. One copy posted to Facebook was shared more than 46,000 times before being deleted over nine hours.

“One of the challenges we see through events like this is people creating new content, new versions, new external links to try to circumvent our policies [and] circumvent our enforcement,” said VP of Integrity Meta, Guy Rosen.

"As in any incident, we will continue to learn to improve our processes, improving our systems to ensure that we can detect that we can remove infringing content more quickly in the future."

However, as reported by Engadget, Meta also shared the latest statistics regarding content that was wrongly removed. For violent content, the company said it eventually recovered 756,000 Facebook posts that were appealed after they were originally deleted.

The social media giant also stated it was currently working on developing robust measures around the error, but did not elaborate on what it would measure beyond the restoration of the proposed content.