Facebook users saw hate speech about once in every 1,000 pieces of content they viewed on the social network between July and September, the company said on Thursday.
This is the first time Facebook has publicly estimated the prevalence of hate speech on its platform, giving a sense of scale of the problem. It published the new metric as part of its quarterly report on how much content it removed from Facebook and Instagram for breaking rules ranging from violence to child exploitation to suicide and self-harm.
“The real question is, ‘What do we not catch? What do we miss?’” said Guy Rosen, Facebook vice president of integrity, on a call with reporters. “It’s why we consider [prevalence] to be the most important measure.”
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