Facebook Created More Than 10,000 ‘Hateful Memes’ to Help Researchers Learn How to Spot Hate Speech
By Business Insider. On Tuesday, Facebook announced it has created a dataset of more than 10,000 “hateful memes” that will be made available to select researchers working to tackle hate speech online. The database was announced alongside the company’s latest community enforcement report — a report detailing the volume of harmful content that the social networking giant detects and takes down from its platform, from hate speech to illegal material.
Modern content moderation is heavily reliant on advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence — but such technologies typically need to be trained by being shown numerous examples of a particular kind of content before they can learn to recognise it reliably. The “hateful memes” dataset created by Facebook is intended to provide a readily available corpus of data for researchers who can then analyse it so as to build technology that can better detect it in future. Facebook also rebuilt the memes using licensed imagery from Getty to avoid copyright issues.
The dataset includes material that is racist, sexist, and incites violence, Facebook said in a blog post: “Our examples also cover a wide variety of protected categories (such as religion, gender, and sexual orientation) and types of attacks (such as inciting violence or portraying types of people as criminals or terrorists). The distribution in the data set reflects the real-world distribution found in the original examples.”
The memes are specifically examples of what is called “multimodal content” — content that derives its full meaning from taking different elements (e.g. text, imagery) into account at the same time. A meme might have a non-offensive caption and a generic photo, but once combined in a certain way they become insulting or hateful. (Read more from “Facebook Created More Than 10,000 ‘Hateful Memes’ to Help Researchers Learn How to Spot Hate Speech” HERE)
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Facebook Removed 9.6M Posts for Hate Speech in q1, Warns of Coronavirus Impact on Content Moderation
By Yahoo Finance. (NASDAQ: FB) in its Community Standards Enforcement Report on Tuesday said it removed 9.6 million posts in the first three months of 2020 for hate speech.
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This is a 68.4% increase over the previous quarter where it removed 5.7 million posts, and 134% increase year-on-year from the first quarter of 2019 where it removed 4.1 million posts.
“We expanded our proactive detection technology for hate speech to new languages, in addition to making improvements to our English detection technology,” Facebook said in the report. “Our proactive rate also increased as a result.”
The social media company said there were 1.3 million appeals against its decision on removing the posts, and it restored about 63,600 of them as a result. (Read more from “Facebook Removed 9.6M Posts for Hate Speech in q1, Warns of Coronavirus Impact on Content Moderation” HERE)
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