Enforcement teams working for Facebook have failed to meet the company’s strict rules of zero tolerance towards rape threats online, its head of safety said on Monday.
Antigone Davis, global head of safety for the California-based tech giant, said in the last nine months her team had been examining whether the tools, resources and policies in place to tackle online abuse were effective.
She told a conference organised by the movement Reclaim the Internet that her team had found staff working on enforcement were not upholding the company’s standards. “We found there were improvements that could be made,” she said. “We have a policy against rape threats; Facebook has zero tolerance towards rape threats but our enforcement did not match our policy. So we spent a lot of time looking at the guidelines we provide for people that review these reports to make sure that our enforcement matches our policy.”
Davis told the conference of campaigners and politicians that her team had seen a huge improvement in how the policy against rape threats was enforced.
But Davis, speaking on a panel with leading figures from Twitter and Google, was challenged with the others about what the companies were doing to measure their performance when it came to tackling abusive misogynistic, racist and homophobic threats and abuse online.
None of the companies will publish data on the number of individuals in their enforcement teams across the globe, or any data on how they perform against the number of complaints and take down requests.
Jenifer Swallow, of All Rise, an organisation combating cyber abuse, said: “Do you have key performance indicators, for example, that by the end of the year cyber abuse will be x, y or z level?
“What is the percentage of abuse on your network, what is it today and what do you want to bring it down to?” She said much more transparency was needed from the tech companies on these issues.
Swallow cited research carried out by her organisation into thousands of comments where an individual has reported the content to social media companies. She said 76% of the abuse that was reported was not removed by the platforms. Analysis of YouTube in another piece of research showed 15% of all comments were abusive.
Davis said safety on Facebook was a primary concern and as a lawyer who worked on abuse cases, a mother and former teacher as well as Facebook’s head of safety, it was not just her job but a personal issue.
Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, called on the tech companies to create tools which meant that when an individual was blocked, the person who blocked them never saw anything related to them or their posts again. Currently that does not happen, she said.
She said so-called “dog piling” on social media – where individuals pile in on a victim in a mass trolling exercise – was designed to silence people. “One of the tech solutions I would like to see is that if I have blocked someone, I don’t want to see anyone who responds to that tweet, even if they are sticking up for me.
“I also want to see social media platforms working more together to tackle this.” She also called for the companies to get rid of individuals who made money out of the “brand” of abusing women. “We need to take their brand off air,” said Phillips.
Labour MP Yvette Cooper, who spoke at the conference, has called for the Labour party and all organisations and institutions to toughen up their responses to social media abusers. She is calling for the NEC to expel any Labour member who was involved in serious harassment and abuse online.
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