As the 2024 election season heats up, Instagram is under fire for failing to adequately remove toxic comments targeting Vice President Kamala Harris and other prominent female politicians. This critique comes from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit focused on analyzing how well major internet platforms manage hate speech.
The CCDH’s recent report, released on Wednesday, analyzed over half a million comments on Instagram posts by ten high-profile female politicians—five Democrats and five Republicans—with high engagement levels. Those tracked include Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee for president, along with representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and Lauren Boebert (R-CO).
From comments posted between January 1 and June 7, researchers identified over 20,000 that Google's Perspective AI labeled as "toxic." Further manual review by CCDH revealed 1,000 comments that clearly breached Instagram's terms of service. CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed emphasized the importance of platforms enforcing policies designed to protect women in public roles, stating that organizations need better tools to support women candidates facing online abuse.
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has faced longstanding criticism from lawmakers for its handling of hateful content across its platforms and alleged failures to combat harmful behaviors. This includes an ongoing lawsuit in which New Mexico's attorney general accuses Meta of failing to protect underage users from predators.
CCDH's report details examples of severe comments such as "make rape legal" and racially charged slurs against Harris, one calling for her assault by President Joe Biden. CCDH used Instagram's content reporting tools to flag the 1,000 offensive comments but found that a week later, the platform had not acted on 93% of them.
In response, Meta pledged to review CCDH's findings and remove any comments violating their policies, while also defending the accuracy of its moderation tools and processes. Cindy Southworth, Meta’s head of women’s safety, highlighted the company’s efforts to empower users with tools to manage comments and filter out offensive content, as well as ongoing collaborations with global safety partners to enhance their policies and enforcement.
The CCDH report follows a lawsuit against it by Elon Musk's X, dismissed by a California federal judge, after CCDH’s research highlighted increased hate speech on the platform post-Musk's acquisition. According to Ahmed, the focus on Musk and X has allowed Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to avoid similar scrutiny, leading to a perception of Instagram as a safer platform. However, CCDH's research challenges this notion, calling on Instagram to match its rhetoric with tangible actions.
