Amnesty International responds to our findings on Facebook’s failure in stopping extremist content in East Africa

Following the release of our report “Under-Moderated, Unhinged and Ubiquitous: Al-Shabaab and the Islamic State Networks on Facebook ”, Amnesty International Kenya and HAKI Africa released a joint statement expressing “deep concern” over our findings about the platform’s failure in stopping terrorist content online, calling for transparency and accountability from Meta and Facebook, and pushing for government standards on mitigating disinformation and further threats to digital democracies.

In our two-year investigation, we found that pages categorised like “media outlets” were openly spreading al-Shabaab and Islamic State extremist content in Swahili, Somali and Arabic despite community guidelines in place.

“The use of automated systems and machine learning to detect violent and extremist content on the platform is not enough. Meta/Facebook must publicly commit to increasing investment in human content moderation. In addition, moderators must be trained in identifying and preventing violent extremism and hate messaging”, Amnesty said.

“We call on Facebook to regularly record and publicly share disaggregated data on the trends, levels and types of abuse being reported and their response. In addition, Facebook must publicly state how many moderators they will deploy to tackle terrorist content and the languages and regions monitored”.

Full statement available here.