Facebook saw declines in the amount of content that was detected and removed/flagged as hate speech, according to the platform's compliance report for December 2021. Content actioned as hate speech dropped to 60,700 pieces from 1,00,000 pieces in November 2021, while its hate speech detection rate slipped to 87.7% from 91.1% in the previous month. Providing figures for both Facebook and Instagram, the compliance report showed that the former saw a rise in grievances from Indian users while the latter registered a slight dip in grievances compared to last month's report. Under the IT Rules 2021, significant social media intermediaries (like Facebook and Instagram) have to publish periodic compliance reports detailing complaints received from users in India and the actions taken by the platform to address these issues. The lack of online content moderation, especially to do with hate speech on Facebook, has been a growing concern and data from compliance reports give an idea on how tech platforms are dealing with such content. Content actioned by Facebook as spam rises by 2.8 million Out of the 12 categories of content on which information was provided, the following ones saw the most noteworthy shifts: Bullying and Harassment: 1,17,000 posts related to bullying and harassment were actioned, up from 1,02,000 posts. The proactive detection rate also increased by 17% (from 40% in November to 57% in December), according to the report. Spam: Content actioned for spam rose by 2.8 million in December (13.8 million spam posts) over the previous month (11 million spam posts)…
