Meta Releases Community Standards Enforcement, Transparency, Widely Viewed Content Reports

Meta spent the Tuesday before Thanksgiving giving thanks to itself with its release of its Adversarial Threat Report for the third quarter of 2022, its Community Standards Enforcement Report for the third quarter, its Transparency Report for the first half of the year and its Widely Viewed Content Report for the third quarter. Chief information security officer Guy Rosen said in a Newsroom post Tuesday, “While our integrity efforts are always evolving, our goal is to reduce the violating content people see while making fewer mistakes. This means ensuring that we take action on content that violates our policies while being more accurate and detecting nuance so that we aren’t taking down things incorrectly, like jokes between friends. For example, now we can better recognize humorous terms of endearment used between friends, or better detect words that may be considered offensive or inappropriate in one context but not another.” Meta said it took action on 16.7 million pieces of content related to terrorism on Facebook during the third quarter, up from 13.5 million in the second quarter, and 2.2 million pieces of content on Instagram, up from 1.9 million, attributing the increase to non-violating videos that were incorrectly added to its media matching technology banks and removed, but eventually restored. The company credited improvements to its proactive detection technology with the removal of 4.1 million pieces of drug content on Facebook in the third quarter, up from 3.9 million in the second quarter, while those numbers for Instagram were 2.5 million and 1.9 million, respectively. An increased number of adversarial spam incidents in August caused spam content removals on Facebook to spike to 1.4 billion in the third quarter from 734.2 million in the second quarter. Meta said leveraging data from past user appeals to identify posts that could have been removed by mistake without appropriate cultural context led to a drop in its proactive detection rate for hate speech, to 90.2% in the third quarter from 95.6% in the previous period, with actions against hate-speech-related content sliding to 10.6 million from 13.5 million. Similarly, improved artificial intelligence technology that better recognized language and emojis used in jest between friends led to a drop to 14.4 million actions against content that incites violence in the third quarter from 19.3 million in the second quarter and the proactive rate for actioning this content falling to 94.3% from 98.2%. Finally, for bullying and harassment-related content, the AI improvements and a bug that was resolved caused the company’s proactive rate to slide to 67.8% from 76.7% on Facebook and to 84.3% from 87.4% on Instagram. Meta said it received 237,414 global government requests for user data in the first six months of 2022, up 10.5% from 214,777 in the second half of 2021, with the largest number of requests coming from the U.S., followed by India, Germany, Brazil, France and the U.K. Three networks were removed during the third quarter of this year for violations of Meta’s policies against coordinated inauthentic behavior. The first originated in the U.S. and was linked to individuals associated with the U.S. military, and it operated across many internet services and focused on Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Somalia, Syria, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Yemen. The second originated in China and targeted the Czech Republic, the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, Chinese- and French-speaking audiences around the world. And the third originated in Russia, primarily targeting Germany but also France, Italy, Ukraine and the U.K. Meta said in its Widely Viewed Content Report for the third quarter that 76.5% of views in Facebook’s Feed during the third quarter were on posts shared by friends, groups people joined or pages they followed, with 15.2% from in Feed recommendations and 8.3% from less common products such as events and from logging discrepancies. The five most-viewed domains on Facebook during the third quarter were: YouTube, 160.2 millionTenor, 113.2 millionGoFundMe, 104.7 millionTikTok, 99.3 millionAmazon, 72.4 million The five most-viewed links were: Elon Musk's mom, Maye, says she sleeps in a 'garage' when she visits him because 'you can't have a fancy house near a rocket site', 16.1 millionMillie Bobby Brown was left in tears after being told she wouldn't make it in Hollywood because she was 'too mature' at 10 years old, 14.8 million13-time Grammy winner Lady Gaga went bankrupt and was $3 million in debt after her Monster Ball tour, 13.8 millionNatalie Portman says Chris Hemsworth would hide behind a tree to avoid drawing attention while picking up his kids from school, 13.3 millionTiger Woods is now a billionaire — here's how he spends his money and lives his life, 12.8 million And the five most-viewed Facebook pages were: Totally the Bomb, 121.4 millionLADbible, 121 millionPlaces I’d Rather Be, 120.8 millionThe War at Home—If Only Someone Knew, 115.7 millionSilver Elephant, 113.7 million