March 29, 2024
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Facebook has reportedly denied report that claimed its AI technology used to detect hate speech or violence has little impact.

In a blog post, Facebook vice president of integrity Guy Rosen wrote that: “the prevalence of hate speech on the platform had dropped by 50 percent over the past three years, and that a narrative that the technology we use to fight hate speech is inadequate and that we deliberately misrepresent our progress was false.”

Rosen wrote: “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 demonstrate is that our integrity work is a multi-year journey. While we will never be perfect, our teams continually work to develop our systems, identify issues and build solutions.”

Facebook’s post was a repose of Wall Street Journal report that said Facebook’s AI cannot consistently identify first-person shooting videos, racist rants and even the difference between cockfighting and car crashes.

According to its report: internal documents show that two years ago, Facebook reduced the time that human reviewers focused on hate speech complaints, and made other adjustments that reduced the number of complaints. That in turn helped create the appearance that Facebook’s artificial intelligence had been more successful in enforcing the company’s rules than it actually was.

A team of Facebook employees found in March that the company’s automated systems were removing posts which generated between 3 and 5 percent of the views of hate speech on the social platform, and less than 1 percent of all content that was in violation of its rules against violence and incitement, the WSJ reported.

But Rosen argued that focusing on content removals alone was the wrong way to look at how we fight hate speech. He said the technology to remove hate speech is just one method Facebook uses to fight it. We need to be confident that something is hate speech before we remove it.

He said, the company believes focusing on the prevalence of hate speech people actually see on the platform and how it reduces it using various tools is a more important measure. He claimed that for every 10,000 views of a piece of content on Facebook, there were five views of hate speech. 3

Rosen wrote: “Prevalence tells us what violating content people see because we missed it. It’s how we most objectively evaluate our progress, as it provides the most complete picture.”

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