A group of shareholders on Thursday demanded that Facebook and Twitter disclose more information about sexual harassment, fake news, hate speech and other forms of abuse that take place on the companies’ platforms.
In the last two years, Silicon Valley companies have come under fire as never before for widespread abuse of their services, including incidents of profiteers spreading false news stories in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election and violent acts committed in real-time on Facebook’s video-streaming service, Facebook Live. Advocates, politicians and many former executives have begun to question the value of the products they built and ask whether those products have had a negative impact.
Twitter and Facebook occasionally post information about their progress and goals in fighting abuse, but the disclosures are highly selective. For example, Facebook has said that the vast majority of reports of violence are reviewed within 24 hours but has not disclosed how many violent acts get posted on the platform or how widely they spread before being taken down. Twitter recently updated its policies on hate speech to clarify that groups that promote violence — either on or off the platform — would be kicked off, but Twitter has never revealed the extent of hate speech.
In September, the Daily Beast published a story showing how Twitter's ad systems identified 26.3 million users who may respond to the term “wetback,” 18.6 million to “Nazi” and 14.5 million to the n-word, if those words were used to target ads. Women boycotted Twitter in October after the service temporarily suspended the account of actress Rose McGowan when she was tweeting about sexual harassment issues.
Facebook and Twitter declined to comment.
Together the shareholders hold roughly $35 million worth of Twitter stock and roughly $1.1 billion of Facebook.