After Meta's decision to relax content moderation, there has been a worrying increase in posts filled with violence and abuse on Facebook. This change has come to the fore after the new policy implemented in january 2025 in which Meta has reduced content removal and strict monitoring. According to Meta's first "Integrity Report", now the amount of harmful content on platforms like facebook is increasing but the cases of action and deletion of posts have reduced.
Increase in violent and objectionable content
According to Meta's report, the amount of violent content on facebook was 0.06-0.07% at the end of 2024, which increased to 0.09% in the first quarter of 2025. These figures may seem small, but on a platform with billions of users, it represents a very large amount of disturbing content. Similarly, incidents of bullying and online harassment have also increased. In march 2025, there was a sudden jump in the share of such content on facebook, increasing the rate from 0.06–0.07% to 0.07–0.08%. This trend shows that the decline that was happening earlier is now going in the opposite direction.
Relaxation in strictness, decline in the number of posts removed
In the first quarter of 2025, Meta took action on only 34 lakh posts under hate content, which is the lowest figure since 2018. The rate of spam removal also fell from 730 million to 366 million. At the same time, identification and deletion of fake accounts also saw a decline from 1.4 billion to 1 billion.
This decline is the result of this new policy in which Meta now focuses only on content related to serious crimes such as child abuse or terrorism, while sensitive topics like immigration, gender identity and race are now excluded from moderation under 'political discussion'.
Definition of hate speech also changed
Meta has also limited the definition of hate speech. Now only those posts are removed which contain direct attacks or dehumanizing language. Posts that were previously removed on the basis of feelings like 'hatred, exclusion or inferiority' are no longer considered necessary to be removed..jpg)
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