India only behind US in user data requests: Meta

India requested 55,497 users’ data from social media company Meta between January to June 2022, Meta said in its integrity report on Wednesday. It is slightly higher than the requests (45,275) made in the same period last year. India was behind the US, which made maximum 69,363 requests for users’ data in H1 2022.  

The report has been released days after Sandhya Devanathan took charge as the new Meta India chief after the resignation of Ajit Mohan this month. WhatsApp India head Abhijit Bose and Meta India's public policy director Rajiv Aggarwal also stepped down this month.  

In the report, ‘Integrity and Transparency Reports’, for the July to September quarter of 2022, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, said the hate speech-related content declined from 13.5 million to 10.6 million in Q3 of 2022 on Facebook. The proactive detection rate for hate speech also witnessed a decline from 95.6% to 90.2% in Q3 of 2022. 

“We’ve done this by leveraging data from past user appeals to identify posts that could have been removed by mistake without appropriate cultural context. For example, now we can better recognize humorous terms of endearment used between friends, or better detect words that may be considered offensive or inappropriate in one context but not another,” the company said. 

Meanwhile, content inciting violence across all its platforms witnessed a decline from 19.3 million to 14.4 million in Q3 of 2022. The content related to bullying and harassment decreased from 76.7% to 67.8% on Facebook, whereas on Instagram it witnessed a decline from 87.4% to 84.3% in Q3 of 2022. 

Meta said that it took action against 16.7 million content pieces on terrorism, 4.1 million pieces on drug content and 1.4 billion pieces of spam content on Facebook. On Instagram, the social media company took action against 2.2 million pieces of content related to terrorism and 2.2 million pieces of drug content. 

Guy Rosen, the vice president of Meta’s integrity division said: “While our integrity efforts are always evolving, our goal is to reduce the violating content people see while making fewer mistakes. This means ensuring we take action on content that violates our policies while being more accurate and detecting nuance so that we aren’t taking down things incorrectly, like jokes between friends.”

Meta recently fired 11,000 employees or 13% of its workforce, owing to weak revenue and dampening macroeconomic situations.