Facebook to use AI to identify 'hateful memes'

With the help of artificial intelligence, social networking site Facebook launched an initiative to take on 'hateful memes'.

The database of 10,000 memes - images often blended with text to deliver a specific message - has already been created by Facebook. To develop improved algorithms to detect hate-driven visual messages, with a prize pool of $100,000, Facebook said it was releasing the database to researchers as a part of a "hateful memes challenge".

Facebook said in a blog post, "These efforts will spur the broader AI research community to test new methods, compare their work, and benchmark their results in order to accelerate work on detecting multimodal hate speech,".

Facebook's effort comes as it leans more heavily on AI to filter out objectionable content during the coronavirus pandemic that has sidelined most of its human moderators.

Facebook, in the first three months, has removed around 9.6 million posts for violating "hate speech" policies and 4.7 million pieces of content connected to organised hate, Facebook’s quarterly transparency report said.

Due to the lockdown, Facebook turns more to machines, and artificial intelligence has become better tuned at filtering.