Instagram has failed to remove toxic comments directed at Vice President Kamala Harris and other leading female politicians from its app as the 2024 election approaches, according to research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
The nonprofit advocacy group is analyzing major internet platforms to see if they properly monitor their sites for hate speech. The report, released Wednesday, was based on an analysis of 560,000 comments on Instagram posts from five Republican and five Democratic politicians with high levels of engagement.
Politicians tracked by the group include Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, Rep. Alexandria Osaka-Cortez, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, and Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
Among the comments posted between January 1 and June 7, the researchers identified more than 20,000 comments they deemed “toxic.” Google Perspective AI's content moderation tool. Researchers then ran a manual analysis and discovered 1,000 comments that “clearly violated Instagram's terms,” CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed said during a media briefing Tuesday.
“Our recommendations can be summed up simply: Instagram must enforce its policies designed to protect women in public life. Organizations must be better equipped to support female candidates who face abuse and provide them with best practices for dealing with it more often,” Ahmed said during the briefing.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram, has come under fire from lawmakers for failing to address the spread of hateful content across its family of apps and for being unable or unwilling to crack down on harmful behavior. The New Mexico attorney general has alleged in an ongoing lawsuit against Meta that the company failed to protect underage users from predators and sexual exploitation.
In previous election cycles, Facebook has also been a hub for the spread of misinformation and toxic content directed at political candidates.
Some of the problematic comments monitored by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Human Rights included statements such as “Make rape legal” and “We don’t want black people around no matter who they are,” the report said. One comment directed at Harris mocked her racial background, while another called for President Joe Biden to sexually assault her.
The Human Rights Center researchers then used Instagram’s own content reporting tools to manually identify the 1,000 abusive comments it had discovered. After a week, “Instagram had not taken action on 926 of them, which amounts to a failure to act on 93 percent of them,” according to the report.
Meta Google said in a statement that it would review the examples highlighted by the CCDH and remove comments that violate the company’s policies, but added that some content may be offensive but does not violate its rules. The company also said that Google’s AI tool that the CCDH relied on for part of its research is not always accurate, citing a Google resource page.
“We provide tools that let anyone control who can comment on their posts, automatically filter out 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.”
Regarding the racist comment directed at Harris, a researcher at the Human Rights Center eventually received a notice on Instagram stating 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 abusive comments the researchers identified came from “repeat offenders who have posted abuse at least twice.”
The Instagram report comes just months after a federal judge in California dismissed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s Center for Human Rights. The lawsuit was filed shortly after the group published research showing an increase in hate speech following Musk’s takeover of the site formerly known as Twitter.
Because of all the negative attention that has poured into Musk, Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have escaped scrutiny recently, and there is a perception that Instagram “has become a platform that people feel safe using,” Ahmed said.
“Mark Zuckerberg has played a strategy of keeping his head down while X has acted as a lightning rod for a lot of the anger about toxicity in public life and political discourse,” Ahmed said. “We wanted to look specifically at this platform to see whether it was supporting some of its schadenfreude over X’s misfortunes through its own actions.”
