Instagram has failed to remove toxic comments directed at Vice President Kamala Harris and other leading female politicians from its app as the 2024 election approaches, according to an investigation by the Center to Combat Digital Hate.
The nonprofit advocacy group analyzes major Internet platforms to determine whether they are properly monitoring their sites for hate speech. Wednesday’s report was based on an analysis of 560,000 comments on Instagram posts by five Republican and five Democratic female politicians with high levels of engagement.
Politicians the group watched included Harris, who is now the Democratic nominee for president, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, as well as Republican House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia and Lauren Boebert from Colorado.
Of the comments posted between January 1 and June 7, the researchers identified more than 20,000 that were deemed “toxic” by of Google AI Perspective Content Checker. The researchers then conducted a manual analysis and discovered 1,000 comments that “clearly violated Instagram’s terms,” CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed said during a media briefing on Tuesday.
“Our recommendations can be summed up very simply as Instagram must enforce its policies designed to protect women in public life,” Ahmed said during the briefing. “Organisations need to be better equipped to support female applicants who experience abuse and provide them with best practices for dealing with it often enough.”
Meta, the parent company of Instagram, has repeatedly come under fire from lawmakers for failing to address the spread of hateful content within its family of apps and for its inability or unwillingness to crack down on harmful behavior. New Mexico’s attorney general alleged in an ongoing lawsuit against Meta that the company is failing to protect underage users from predators and sexual exploitation.
In previous election cycles, Facebook has also been a hub for the spread of misinformation and toxic content aimed at political candidates.
Some of the problematic comments recorded by the CCDH included statements such as “make rape legal” and “we don’t want black people around us no matter who they are,” the report said. One comment directed at Harris mocked her racial background, while another called for President Joe Biden to sexually assault her.
CCDH researchers then used Instagram’s content reporting tools to flag the 1,000 offensive comments it discovered manually. A week later, “Instagram had taken no action against 926 of them, which equates to a failure to act on 93% of them,” the report said.
After said in a statement that it would review the examples pointed out by CCDH and remove comments that violate the company’s policies, but added that some content may be offensive but not violate its rules. The company also said the Google AI tool CCDH relied on for part of its research isn’t always accurate, citing a Google resource page.
“We’re providing tools so anyone can control who can comment on their posts, automatically filter out offensive comments, phrases or emojis, and automatically hide comments from people who don’t follow them,” said Cindy Southworth, chief security officer. of the women of Meta. in a statement. “We work with hundreds of security partners around the world to continually improve our policies, tools, detection and enforcement, and will review the CCDH report and take action on any content that violates our policies.”
Regarding the racist comment directed at Harris, one of the CCDH investigators eventually received a notice on Instagram saying the post “does not violate our Community Guidelines,” the report said. The report also said that more than a fifth of the 1,000 abusive comments highlighted by the researchers came from “repeat offenders” who had posted abuse at least twice.
The Instagram petition comes just months after a California federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against CCDH by Elon Musk’s X. The lawsuit was filed shortly after the group published research showing an increase in hate speech following Musk’s acquisition of the site formerly known as Twitter.
Because of all the negative attention directed at Musk, Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have gotten out of hand lately, and there’s a perception that Instagram “has become a platform that people feel safe” using, Ahmed said. .
“Mark Zuckerberg has played a strategy of keeping his head down while X acts as a lightning rod for much of the anger about toxicity in public life and political discourse,” Ahmed said. “We wanted to specifically look at that platform to see if they were actually supporting some of X’s mishaps with their own action.”
