Anika Begay
Instagram has failed to remove toxic comments directed at Vice President Kamala Harris and other prominent female politicians from its app as the 2024 election approaches, according to research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
The advocacy nonprofit is analyzing major internet platforms to see if they are properly monitoring their sites for hate speech. Wednesday’s report was based on an analysis of 560,000 comments on Instagram posts from five Republican female politicians and five Democratic female politicians with high levels of engagement.
Among the politicians monitored by the group were Harris, now the Democratic presidential candidate, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), as well as Republican House members Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
Of the comments posted between January 1 and June 7, researchers identified more than 20,000 that were deemed “toxic” by By Google Content moderation tool Perspective AI. Researchers then conducted a manual analysis and discovered 1,000 comments that “clearly violated Instagram’s terms,” CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed said at a press conference Tuesday.
“Our recommendations can be summarized very simply, which is that Instagram must enforce its policies designed to protect women in public life,” Ahmed said at the briefing. “Organizations must be better equipped to support female candidates who are experiencing abuse and to provide them with best practices for dealing with it fairly often.”
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has repeatedly been criticized by lawmakers for failing to address the spread of hate speech across its family of apps and for its inability or unwillingness to crack down on harmful behavior. New Mexico’s attorney general has alleged in an ongoing lawsuit against Meta that the company is failing to protect underage users from predators and sexual exploitation.
In previous election cycles, Facebook has also been a hub for the spread of disinformation and toxic content targeting political candidates.
Some of the problematic comments captured by CCDH included statements like “legalize rape” and “we don’t want black people around us, no matter who they are,” the report said. One comment directed at Harris mocked her racial background, while another comment invoked her sexual assault by President Joe Biden.
CCDH researchers then used Instagram’s content reporting tools to flag the 1,000 abusive comments they had manually discovered. A week later, “Instagram had taken no action on 926 of them, which equates to a failure to act on 93 percent of them,” the report reads.
Half said in a statement that it would review the examples highlighted by CCDH and remove comments that violate company policies, but added that some content may be offensive but not violate its rules. The company also said that the Google artificial intelligence tool that CCDH relied on for some of its research was not always accurate.
“We provide tools so anyone can control who can comment on their posts, automatically filter offensive comments, phrases or emojis, and automatically hide comments from people who don’t follow them,” Cindy Southworth, Meta’s head of women’s safety, said in a statement. “We work with hundreds of safety partners around the world to continually improve our policies, tools, detection and enforcement, and we will review the CCDH report and take action on any content that violates our policies.”
As for the racist comment directed at Harris, one of the CCDH researchers eventually received an Instagram notification that the post “does not violate our Community Guidelines,” the report said. The report also said that more than a fifth of the 1,000 offensive comments researchers flagged were from “‘repeat offenders’ who had posted the slur at least twice.”
The Instagram report comes months after a California federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against CCDH by Elon Musk’s X. The lawsuit was filed shortly after the group published research showing a rise in hate speech following Musk’s acquisition of the site formerly known as Twitter.
Because of all the negative attention given to Musk, Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have recently escaped public scrutiny, and there is a perception that Instagram “has become a platform where people feel safe,” Ahmed said.
“Mark Zuckerberg has adopted a strategy of keeping his head down while X serves as a lightning rod for a lot of anger about toxicity in public life and political discourse,” Ahmed said. “We wanted to look specifically at that platform to see if they’re actually backing up some of their gloating over X’s misfortunes with their own actions.”
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