MANILA, Philippines – Meta on Thursday, August 4, provided figures for actions taken by Facebook on harmful content relating to the 2022 Philippine elections. 

The company removed 15,000 accounts via its automated systems for violating the platform’s rules on inauthentic behavior or the use of fake accounts. Facebook noted that its automated systems were able to take down the said accounts thanks to earlier work ahead of the elections by its investigative teams. The teams took down more than 10,000 accounts, with the insights from these takedowns applied to its automated system. The company said that an expert team reviews the accounts identified by the system before they are taken down. 

The fake accounts were being used to inflate the distribution of election-related content including some that would use politics merely to get people’s attention. Some were not inherently political actors, and were people trying to make money by using election-related topics alongside other topics such as sports and entertainment to get people to click through links and go to their websites, potentially to sell something, Meta’s director for global threat disruption, David Agranovich explained in an online press call.

On average, the clusters they took down were about 6 months old when they were found and disabled. 

From January 9 to May 16, 2022, the company took action on more than 5 million pieces of content for violating its violence and incitement policies on both Facebook and Instagram in the Philippines. 

They noted the use of artificial intelligence that they “trained in Filipino” to help the company detect and remove hate speech, bullying and harassment, and other violative content. It said that it reduced the distribution of content that was identified by their system as “likely to be violating those policies.” 

Over 670,000 pieces of content received action for violating hate speech policies, while another 550,000 received action for violating bullying and harassment policies. 

68,000 ad submissions from February 8 to May 7, 2022, the elections’ campaign period, were rejected for not completing the platform’s authorization process or not attaching a “paid for by” disclaimer. Facebook’s various voter registration campaigns and election day reminders received about 5.5 million clicks, from May 1 to May 9, 2022. – Rappler.com