October 18, 2021

Facebook’s vice president of integrity Guy Rosen called the report that the technology the company uses to fight hate speech “inadequate” and “deliberately misrepresents its progress.”

In his response to the allegations made by the WSJ, Rosen said that focusing solely on removing content is “the wrong way to look at how we fight hate speech.” For him, hate speech removal technology is just one of the methods Facebook uses to combat it.

Rosen noted that the company “need to be confident that something is hate speech” before it can be removed. He explained that Facebook instead believes that focusing on the frequency of hate speech people see on the platform and how the company reduces it through various tools is a more important measure to contain it.

Internal documents obtained by the WSJ showed that some significant content was able to bypass Facebook’s detection, including videos of car crashes that showed people with graphic injuries and violent threats against trans children, suggesting that the AI the company uses is inadequate in combating hate speech and violence.

For more information, read the original story in The Verge.