Facebook said it was reviewing CounterAction’s findings.
San Francisco:
Before Facebook Inc on Thursday shut down a rapidly growing “Stop the Steal” Facebook group, the forum featured calls for members to prepare their weapons if President Donald Trump lost his offer to stay in the White House.
In disabling the group after coverage by Reuters and other news outlets, Facebook cited the forum’s efforts to delegitimize the electoral process and “worrying calls for violence by some members.”
Such rhetoric was not uncommon in the run-up to elections in Facebook groups, a key engagement factor for the world‘s largest social network, but it hasn’t always received the same treatment.
A survey of US-based Facebook groups between September and October conducted by digital intelligence firm CounterAction at the behest of Reuters revealed rhetoric with violent overtones in thousands of politically-oriented public groups with millions of members .
Twenty-sentence variations that may be associated with calls for violence, such as “lock and load” and “we need a civil war”, have appeared with references to election results in about 41,000 cases in US-based public Facebook groups on both. period of one month.
According to CounterAction, other phrases, such as “shoot them” and “kill them all,” have been used in public groups at least 7,345 times and 1,415 times. “Hang It On” has appeared 8,132 times. “It’s time to start filming, my friends,” read a comment.
Facebook said it was reviewing CounterAction’s findings, which Reuters shared with the company, and that it would take action to implement policies “that reduce real-world damage and civil unrest, including among groups. “, according to a statement provided by spokesperson Dani Lever.
The company declined to say whether the examples shared by Reuters violate its rules or where it draws the line in deciding whether a phrase “incites or promotes serious violence,” which its policies say is grounds for removal.
Prosecutors have linked several disrupted militia plots to Facebook groups this year, including a planned attack on Black Lives Matters protesters in Las Vegas and a plan to kidnap the Michigan governor.
To address concerns, Facebook has announced a wave of policy changes since the summer aimed at curbing “militarized social movements,” including the US militias, the Boogaloo networks and the QAnon conspiracy movement.
He says he has removed 14,200 groups based on these changes since August.
As pressure on the company escalated ahead of the election, Zuckerberg said Facebook would suspend recommendations for political groups and new groups, although the move did not prevent the “Stop the Steal” group from passing. to over 365,000 members in less than 24 hours.
“SIGNIFICANT CONNECTIONS”
Facebook has aggressively promoted the groups since chief executive Mark Zuckerberg made them a strategic priority in 2017, saying they would encourage more “meaningful connections,” and this year featured the company in a Super Bowl ad. .
He stepped up promotion of the Group in news feeds and search engine results last month, even as civil rights organizations warned that the product had become fertile ground for extremism and advocacy. disinformation.
Public groups can be seen, searched and joined by anyone on Facebook. Groups also provide private options that conceal posts – or the existence of the forum – even when a group has hundreds of thousands of members.
Facebook said it relies heavily on artificial intelligence to monitor forums, especially private groups, which report few reports of users of bad behavior because members tend to be like-minded, to report publications likely to incite violent actions against critics of human content.
While the use of violent language doesn’t always amount to an exploitable threat, Matthew Hindman, a machine learning and media specialist at George Washington University who reviewed the results, said the intelligence artificial Facebook should have been able to choose common terms to examine.
“If you still find thousands of cases of ‘pull them’ and ‘get a rope’, you’re looking for a systemic problem. There’s no way a modern machine learning system would miss something like this, ”he says.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
