One of Meta Platform INC’s subsidiaries, Facebook put out a comprehensive report which showed that the company ‘actioned’ almost 22 million pieces of content put out by Indians which spanned 13 different rules breaking. This was just for the month of March.
Most of the content which the company took action on was related to bullying, child safety, harassment, various types of spamming, violent and not safe for work posts, and posts which featured illegal and dangerous groups.
The report said that while Facebook took action on 21.6 million separate Indian based posts, their sister company, Instagram took action against over 2.6 million posts from India on their platform just for the month of March.
According to the information technology laws that were introduced in May, just under a year ago, tech digital platforms like Instagram and Snapchat that have at least 5 million active monthly listeners have to publish a comprehensive monthly report that details the complaints the companies have received, the posts and content that have been reported, flagged or taken down and other actions taken by them on the content posted by its users. This includes the tools and AI that used to identify the content and whether they were reviewed manually as well.
According to the report’s breakup, about 2.7 million posts that were removed broke bullying and harassment laws. Almost 5.8 million involved self-harm, suicidal posts and domestic violence. 1.6 million posts were related to terrorist activities. Almost 15 million posts were taken down or suspended due to spam while 2 and a half million posts showed violent and graphic content. Just over 2 million posts were not safe work content relating to pornographic and sexual content.
The company went to say that they have tools that automatically respond to people’s reports and complaints and scans the content on its own to check if it violates the set terms and conditions or not. If the reports continue or the tool’s results are inconclusive, it will then be checked and verified manually and the appreciate action will be taken accordingly. They also said that they take this very seriously and that the company responds to every single report and upholds their terms and conditions to the highest honour.
The concept of the Indian government forcing these companies to publish monthly reports seems to be a great one as they can pinpoint exactly where the rules and regulations are broken and accordingly and even educate the masses on how to use social media and how to keep a clean digital profile.