Meta and X have categorically failed in a recent test to take down hate-speech ads on their platforms, raising serious questions about the harm they cause ahead of tomorrow’s election in Germany.
A corporate accountability group called Ekō submitted ten ads to Meta and X that contained clear examples of extremist hate speech, incitement to violence ahead of the German election, and AI imagery, all of which serve as grounds for blocking an ad from running.
The ads contained calls for the imprisonment and gassing of immigrants, the burning of mosques with dehumanising speech, and equated immigrants to animals and pathogens. The accompanying AI-generated images depicting violent imagery, such as ”scenes of immigrants crowded into a gas chamber and synagogues on fire.”
The submissions were made from 10-14 February, and Meta approved half of them within 12 hours and X scheduled all the submitted for publication, according to the researchers. Ekō‘s researchers then removed the ads before they went live, so were never seen by the platforms’ users.
These ads were geo-restricted to Germany and appeared in the German language.
Meta’s platforms, Instagram and Facebook, and X, are signatories to the EU Code of Conduct on countering illegal hate speech online which was revised last month and integrated under the Digital Services Act. The Code requires the signatories to take proactive steps to counter illegal hate speech on their platform and remove access to the content.
The researchers said that they have submitted the research to the Commission which is already investigating Meta and X under the DSA.
A spokesperson for Meta told Euractiv that “these ads violate our policies” and contended that the platform’s safeguards would have prevented them from going live.
“None of them were published and our systems detected and disabled the advertiser’s page before we became aware of this research. Our ads review process has several layers of analysis and detection, both before and after an ad goes live,” the Meta spokesperson said. “We’ve taken extensive steps in alignment with the DSA and continue to invest significant resources to protect elections.”