Meta says online harassment is up and false flags are down following a change in content moderation policies

Business Insider

4 days ago

Meta reported that online bullying and harassment on Facebook rose slightly in Q1 2025 compared to Q4 2024.
"There was a small increase in the prevalence of bullying and harassment content from 0.06-0.07% to 0.07-0.08% on Facebook due to a spike in sharing of violating content in March," Meta said in its first quarter integrity report published on Thursday. "There was also a small increase in the prevalence of violent and graphic content on Facebook from 0.06%-0.07% to about 0.09% due to an increase in sharing of violating content as well as a result of ongoing work to reduce enforcement mistakes."
In a statement to Business Insider, Erica Sackin, a spokesperson for Meta, wrote, "What 0.06% to 0.07% actually means is that prevalence of that type of content went from 6 views out of every 10,000 to 7 views out of every 10,000."
Meta did not elaborate on what precipitated the influx of violent content in March.
Meta overhauled its content moderation policies in January, paring them down to allow more political content across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. It eliminated several restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity, and gender that "are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate," it said in a blog post announcing the changes in January.
With that, it also changed its definition of "hate speech," and said it would focus on flagging "direct attacks against people" and dehumanizing speech. Prior to the changes, Meta attempted to flag a broader range of aggressions, including "statements of inferiority, expressions of contempt or disgust; cursing; and calls for exclusion or segregation."
The biggest change, though, was that it eliminated third-party fact-checkers and replaced them with crowd-sourced community notes like its competitor X.
Meta said the most meaningful statistical change it observed from its new policies was a reduction in error rates.
Under its old content moderation policies, Meta said it removed millions of pieces of content per day, and estimated that one or two in 10 were flagged in error. With its new changes, the company says it has cut those mistakes in half.
" Our Q1 2025 report is the first quarter where these changes are reflected in the data," Sackin wrote. "Across a range of policy areas, we saw a decrease in the amount of content actioned and a decrease in the percent of content we took action on before a user reported it."
She added, however, that Meta is working to "strike the right balance" between too little enforcement and violating content, and too much enforcement, and many mistakes.
That idea was echoed by Theresa Payton, CEO and founder of cybersecurity firm Fortalice Solutions, and the first US Chief Information Officer during President George Bush 's second term, who spoke to Business Insider in late January.
"Community notes have allowed for 'the democratization of fact-checking,'" she said. "You have to end up having both technology monitoring community notes to make sure you don't have bots or people who don't have pure intentions, and there could be an opportunity for risk bias or misinformation there as well."
Meta's latest Community Standards Enforcement Report showed the prevalence of online bullying and harassment violations on the platforms was between 0.08% and 0.09% in the first quarter of 2024 and around 0.07% in the first quarter of 2023. Similarly, these violations were a bit lower toward the end of the year, falling at around 0.07% in the fourth quarter of both 2024 and 2023. Violations peaked in the second quarter of both years.