A fresh study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) showed that Instagram failed to remove 93% of abusive comments directed at female politicians out of 1,000 examples flagged to the app for potential rule violations, NBC reports.
The CCDH collected these comments this summer from the Instagram accounts of 10 female politicians, including both Republicans and Democrats. They then reported the comments to Instagram and checked back a week later to find that the vast majority remained online.
Many of the abusive comments that the platform left up included sexually degrading language, violent threats, and even explicit mentions of rape, injury, or death, all of which likely violate the app’s community guidelines.
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, stated that it hadn’t seen the report prior to its release but would review the examples. The company’s systems are a work in progress and that they are working with partners to improve their policies, detection, and enforcement.
The report comes as Vice President Kamala Harris, who was among the politicans whose accounts were examined for the study, seeks to become the nation’s first female president.
The CCDH chose to focus its report on Instagram because it is perceived as a “safe” platform, and the organization wanted to test that perception. While the abusive comments analyzed in the report were a minority of all comments on Instagram, they reflected a significant problem, the report says. The center estimated that around 1 in 25 replies to female politicians on Instagram are likely to be toxic.
While Instagram has claimed to be good at finding hateful messages before anyone even tells them about it, saying its special computer program catches 98% of the bad stuff, the study has stressed that many mean comments come from repeat offenders.
