Facebook May Look At Region-Specific Rules To Curb Fake News And Hate Speech

Facebook Inc is exploring ways to curb hate speech and fake news through region-specific content regulation as the company seeks to be more sensitive towards the individual needs of the countries and communities over such content circulating on its platform.

Facebook vice-president for product management, Guy Rosen, told Economic Times, “It is challenging to have one global standard as Facebook currently has, since what may be offensive to one community may not be so to another. Sometime in the future, there is room to think about something that is maybe more regionalised and something that does have a little more variation.”

The social media company doesn’t want its users to make violent threats or revel in adult violence; promote terrorism or the poaching of endangered species; attempt to buy banned drugs, sell firearms or list prescription drug prices for sale amongst other such activities.

It has already banned most of these actions on the community standards page which it used earlier. On Tuesday, Facebook Inc released the global statistics on the data it took down – for the first time.

Let’s Look At The Statistics, Facebook Released

• Took down 2.45 Mn hate posts in the Q1 of 2018, up from 1.61 Mn in the Q4 of 2017.
• Took down 20,984,892 post related to adult activity.
• Took down 3,445,466 posts related to graphic violence.
• Detected 3-4% of the total monthly active users using fake accounts. The percentage was consistent in the first quarter of 2018 with a total 583 Mn accounts.
• Detected 98.5% of the fake accounts created in the first three months of 2018.
• Took down 1.86 Mn posts related to terror in Q1, compared with 1.8 Mn in the Q4 of 2017.

In the most recent development, Facebook suspended over 200 applications running on its platform that have misused user personal data. These apps were suspended in the first stage of investigation which its CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on March 21, in response to Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal.

After the scandal, government requests for account data of Facebook users have reportedly witnessed a sudden rise compared to previous years and request from Indian government stood highest after the US.

In a transparency report released, Facebook revealed that globally, governments sought details of 82,341 Facebook accounts in 2018, a 4% increase compared to the first half of 2017. Of the total numbers, the Indian government alone sought the details of 17,262 users of the social media platform.

According to Rosen, Facebook is further planning on releasing the numbers which are country or region specific.