Instagram has fallen short in eliminating noxious remarks aimed at Vice President Kamala Harris and other prominent female policymakers from its platform as the 2024 election approaches, as per research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

This nonprofit organization is examining major online platforms to determine if they are effectively monitoring their websites for hate speech. The study released on Wednesday was conducted by analyzing 560,000 comments on Instagram posts from five Republican and five Democratic female policymakers with significant engagement levels.

The policymakers under scrutiny included Harris, the current Democratic presidential nominee, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), as well as Republican House members Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia and Lauren Boebert from Colorado.

Out of the comments posted between January 1 and June 7, researchers identified over 20,000 comments categorized as “toxic” by Google’s Perspective AI content moderation tool. After a manual review, 1,000 comments were found to “clearly violate Instagram’s terms,” said CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed during a press briefing on Tuesday.

“Our suggestions can be summed up quite plainly as Instagram must implement its policies intended to safeguard women in public roles,” Ahmed stated during the briefing. “Organizations need to be better prepared to support female candidates facing harassment and to offer them best practices for handling it frequently.”

Meta, the parent company of Instagram, has faced repeated criticism from lawmakers for failing to tackle the proliferation of hateful content across its suite of apps and for its incapacity or unwillingness to crack down on harmful conduct. The attorney general of New Mexico has alleged in an ongoing lawsuit against Meta that the company is not adequately safeguarding underage users from predators and sexual exploitation.

In past election cycles, Facebook has also served as a hotbed for disseminating misinformation and toxic content aimed at political contenders.

Some of the troubling comments documented by CCDH included remarks such as “make rape legal” and “we don’t want minorities in our vicinity regardless of who they may be,” the report highlighted. One comment targeting Harris ridiculed her ethnic background, while another comment advocated for her sexual assault by President Joe Biden.

CCDH researchers utilized Instagram’s own content reporting tools to flag the 1,000 offensive comments they manually unearthed. A week later, “Instagram had taken no action against 926 of them, corresponding to a failure to act on 93% of them,” as per the report.

Meta stated in a release that they will review the instances brought to light by CCDH and will eliminate comments that contravene company regulations, but mentioned that some content may be offensive without breaching their rules. The company also indicated that the Google AI tool used by CCDH for part of the research is not always accurate.

“We offer tools to enable individuals to control who can comment on their posts, automatically filter out offensive comments, phrases, or emojis, and automatically conceal comments from individuals not following them,” stated Cindy Southworth, Meta’s head of women’s safety, in a press release. “We collaborate with numerous safety partners globally to continually refine our policies, tools, detection, and enforcement, and we will review the CCDH report and take action on any content violating our policies.”

In reference to the racist remark directed at Harris, a CCDH researcher eventually received an Instagram notification stating that the post “does not violate our Community Guidelines,” the report indicated. The report also noted that more than one-fifth of the 1,000 offensive comments flagged by the researchers originated from “‘repeat offenders’ who had posted abuse at least twice.”

The report on Instagram comes after a few months from the dismissal of a lawsuit against CCDH by Elon Musk’s X by a California federal judge. The lawsuit was filed shortly after the group presented research illustrating an uptick in hate speech following Musk’s acquisition of the platform previously known as Twitter.  

Due to the negative focus directed at Musk, Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have escaped recent scrutiny and there is a perception that Instagram “has morphed into a platform that users consider safe” to utilize, Ahmed claimed.

“Mark Zuckerberg has adopted a strategy of maintaining a low profile while X is serving as a focal point for much of the frustration towards the toxicity in public life and political dialogue,” stated Ahmed. “We specifically wanted to examine that platform to assess if they are indeed backing up some of their gloating over X’s misfortunes with actions of their own.”

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