Instagram is under fire for its failure to remove hate speech targeting female politicians as the 2024 election approaches, according to a report released by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and reported by CNBC.

The report, published on Wednesday, August 14, revealed that Instagram did not take sufficient action against harmful comments directed at Vice President Kamala Harris and other prominent female politicians. CCDH’s research analyzed 560,000 comments on Instagram posts from ten female politicians — five Republicans and five Democrats — who have high levels of engagement on the platform.

Toxic comments target leading female politicians

The analysis focused on comments made between January 1 and June 7, 2024. Using Google’s Perspective AI content moderation tool, CCDH identified more than 20,000 comments as “toxic.”

Following this automated discovery, CCDH researchers manually reviewed the content and found that 1,000 of these comments clearly violated Instagram’s Terms of Service. Those politicians included Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.) and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) from the Democratic Party, as well as Republican House members Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga). ) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.).

The report highlighted several worrying examples of toxic comments, including:

• Racist and misogynistic comments Harris’s racial background.
• Statements like “make rape legal” and “we don’t want black people around us no matter who they are.”
• Calling Harris Sexual Assault by President Joe Biden.

Despite these clear violations, when CCDH researchers reported the 1,000 offensive comments through Instagram’s content reporting tool, the platform failed to take action on 926 of them, representing a 93% inaction rate, according to the report.

Meta’s @instagram failing female politicians despite their own guidelines for the community.

The platform ignores rules that prohibit attacks targeting individuals based on their race, ethnicity, gender and gender identity, as well as sexualized comments and calls for violence. pic.twitter.com/GhVBJ4U0wV

— Center for Countering Digital Hate (@CCDHate) August 14, 2024

CCDH criticizes Instagram’s inaction

CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed criticized Instagram during a media briefing on Tuesday, August 13, stressing that the platform must enforce its policies designed to protect women in public life. He argued that organizations should be better equipped to support female candidates who experience online abuse and should offer best practices for dealing with such harassment.

Ahmed pointed out that much of the current public scrutiny is focused on Elon Musk’s platform, X (formerly Twitter), which has shifted attention away from Instagram. He warned that this perception of security on Instagram may not be accurate, as the platform continues to host malicious content without adequate enforcement.

Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has come under fire from lawmakers for its repeated failures to address the spread of hate speech and harmful content across its platforms.

In response to the CCDH report, Meta issued a statement acknowledging that it would review the examples highlighted by CCDH and remove comments that violate company policies. But Meta also noted that some content may be offensive but not against its rules, adding that the Google AI tool used by CCDH for some of its analysis is not always accurate.

Cindy Southworth, Meta’s director of women’s safety, defended the company’s efforts by highlighting the tools available to users to control their experience on the platform. These tools include:

• Options to control who can comment on their posts.
• Automatic filters to remove offensive comments, phrases or emojis.
• Automatic hiding of comments from people who do not follow them.

Southworth stated that Meta works with hundreds of security partners worldwide to continuously improve its policies, tools, detection and enforcement. She confirmed that the company would review the CCDH report and take appropriate action on any content that violates its policies.

Increased scrutiny across social media platforms

The CCDH report also touched on the wider context of social media platforms and their role in political discourse. The organization’s focus on Instagram comes after a federal judge in California dismissed a trial against CCDH by Elon Musk’s X, which was filed after the group published research showing an increase in hate speech on the platform following Musk’s acquisition. Ahmed suggested that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has strategically kept a low profile while X has become the focus of public anger regarding the toxicity of public life and political discourse.

In one specific case cited in the CCDH report, a researcher received a message from Instagram that a racist comment directed at Harris did not violate the platform’s community guidelines. The report also found that more than a fifth of the 1,000 offensive comments flagged by researchers were posted by repeat offenders, people who had previously posted offensive content on the platform.

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Featured image courtesy of ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

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