Last year, Meta radically
overhauled the rules around what content it would allow on its platforms. The company claimed that its own efforts policing speech had gone too far and that it would relax the rules around what speech was allowed. “We have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, wrote in a blog post at the time.
Over a year later,
new research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) shows the immediate impact of these changes.
The researchers analyzed about 8 million Facebook comments and found that abusive and racist comments targeting both Republican and Democrat lawmakers tripled in the six months after the new rules were put in place. Some categories of abusive comments documented by the researchers saw even sharper rises, with violent threats and hate speech quadrupling during the same period.
The report cites specific examples of gendered and racist abuse directed at lawmakers like US representatives Jasmine Crockette of Texas and Byron Daniels of Florida. These comments were not taken down by Meta.
The CCDH researchers also found that threats against President Trump more than doubled in the six months after Meta overhauled its rules. Many of the comments, which included direct threats to his life, could have been classified as felony offenses, the researchers say.
To assess the impact of these rule changes, CCDH’s researchers chose 100 members of the House of Representatives made up of the 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats with the most followers on Facebook. Then the researchers scraped nearly 8 million comments on Facebook posts made by those lawmakers in the six months before and after Meta’s policy changes.
<small>Source: Ars Technica</small>
