Press Release

ADL Statement on Facebook's First Enforcement Data

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New York, NY, May 15, 2018 … The Anti-Defamation League released a statement today after Facebook for the first time published data detailing its enforcement of the platform’s community standards, including its standards on hate speech.

The following is a statement from Brittan Heller, director of ADL’s Center for Technology and Society:

We welcome this new level of transparency from Facebook. For us, it underscores the immense challenge we all have in trying to address hate speech online. While Facebook’s technology detected practically all spam and almost all graphic content, the same technology flagged just 38 percent of hate speech, leaving the majority to be addressed by reviewers on their staff. This is precisely why we are working on the Online Hate Index to tap the power of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and social science to understand hate speech online. Our goal is to help companies like Facebook better comprehend the extent of hateful content on their platforms by creating community-based definitions of hate speech.

For more on this topic, read Brittan’s op-ed in Wired magazine:
What Mark Zuckerberg Gets Wrong—And Right—About Hate Speech.

The Facebook report can be found by clicking here.