Content reviewers of Facebook from around the world do their routine checkup and scan posts that are reported by its users or its algorithm. 15,000 workers are dedicated on working on this every day, they have the authority to decide if the post is suitable for their platform, remove it from their platform, or pass it on to the content policy team of Facebook.
The company has said that it does not proactively block locally illegal content for viewers in specific countries this is also known as IP-Blocking Content unless their legal team says that it is valid.
Facebook has said that its policy does not consider belief and speech attacking religion as a hate speech. But, according to new reports the company is still tracking these types of content in India.
In one of the slides of Facebook Documents states that: “Content doesn’t violate Facebook policy”, “Respecting local laws when the government actively pursues enforcement”, and “Facebook risks getting blocked in a country, or it’s a legal risk”.
Facebook chose not to say anything when asked about how many countries have the same guidelines.
When you open operational guidelines, the document that pops-up shows moderators examples of the type of content that needs to be flagged. Maps of Kashmir, Aksai chain, depicting Muhammad, and images of replacing the wheel of the Indian flag are some of the examples that are shown.
If you look at the national border section, you will see that posts that are related or supporting of separating the Kashmir state, China’s claim to Aksai Chin, Arunachal Pradesh, and others are going to be flagged.
Also, moderators are assigned to look for specific terms like “Azad Kashmir, Free Kashmir, Kashmir belongs to Pakistan… Look for maps invading territories, people protesting, etc”.
Images of Mohammed may violate the IPC under Section 295, which does not allow insults to religious beliefs. One guideline states: “Legal is more risk-averse when it comes to litigation over religious imagery… If there is a violating image but the caption or context clearly condemns this defamation, such an image may still be considered offensive and liable to be GEO IP Blocked,”
Under the religion categories, it highlights that “Defamation of deities”, “Negative remarks of mocking images about religious gods & prophets”, “Comparing deities” and “Calling for new states based on religious community” are the things moderators will look out in the posts.
The third category which is national symbols includes stamping, writing, burning the national flag.
Recently publicized draft to the IT Act, says that companies are needed to take down unlawful content on their websites or platforms. The documents revealed Facebook’s way of content moderation during the draft of this amendment.
When Facebook showed its transparency reports about the takedown requests that came from Official Agencies in India, it showed the dramatic decrease in requests sent. In 2015 there were 30,000 requests, and in 2017 there were only 3,000. Most of the contents that were removed were about anti-state and anti-religion.
India was number one on the content takedown request in the year 2013, but now India is now at number 7.
Facebook has removed 1.6 million hate speech related content in the last quarter of 2017, the numbers are still rising, and in the last quarter of 2018, the numbers were around 3 million.
50 percent of the posts that were taken down by Facebook were detected by their own company, this means that before someone actually reported the hate speech, the company did already detected them and got flagged right away.
One Facebook report states that: “The amount of content we flagged increased from around 24% in Q4 2017 because we improved our detection technology and processes to find and flag more content before users reported it.”
India is currently Facebook’s largest market, with having around 300 million active users.