"Facebook teams fail to uphold company's rape abuse standards", 18 July 2016

Enforcement teams working for Facebook have failed to uphold the company’s strict rules of zero tolerance towards rape threats online, its head of safety said on Monday.

Antigone Davis, global head of safety for [Facebook]...told a conference organised by the movement Reclaim the Internet...“We have a policy against rape threats...[of] zero tolerance...but our enforcement did not match our policy. So we spent a lot of time looking at the guidelines we provide...to make sure that our enforcement matches our policy.”  Davis...[said] her team had seen a huge improvement in how the policy against rape threats was enforced.

But Davis, speaking on a panel with leading figures from Twitter and Google [part of Alphabet], was challenged with the others about what the companies were doing to measure their performance when it came to tackling abusive misogynistic, racist and homophobic threats and abuse online.

None...publish data...on how they perform against the number of complaints and take down requests.

Jenifer Swallow, of All Rise, an organisation combating cyber abuse, said: “Do you have key performance indicators, for example, that by the end of the year cyber abuse will be x, y or z level?"...She said much more transparency was needed from the tech companies on these issues. [also refers to YouTube (part of Alphabet)]