According to an investigation by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Instagram failed to remove toxic comments directed at Vice President Kamala Harris and other female political leaders from its app shortly before the 2024 election.

The nonprofit analyzes major internet platforms to see if they adequately monitor their pages for hate speech. Wednesday’s report was based on an analysis of 560,000 comments on Instagram posts by five high-engagement Republican and five Democratic politicians.

The politicians the group monitored included Harris, the current Democratic presidential candidate, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

Of the comments published between January 1 and June 7, researchers identified over 20,000 that were classified as “toxic.” Google’s Perspective AI content moderation tool. Researchers then conducted a manual analysis and discovered 1,000 comments that “clearly violated Instagram’s terms,” ​​CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed said during a press conference on Tuesday.

“Our recommendations are simple: Instagram must enforce its policies designed to protect women in public life,” Ahmed said during the briefing. “Organizations must be better equipped to support female candidates who experience abuse and frequently provide them with best practices on how to deal with it.”

Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has been repeatedly criticized by lawmakers for failing to combat the spread of hate content on its family of apps and for being unable or unwilling to crack down on harmful behavior. New Mexico’s attorney general has alleged in an ongoing lawsuit against Meta that the company fails to protect underage users from sexual assault and sexual exploitation.

In previous election cycles, Facebook has also been a hub for the spread of misinformation and harmful content targeting political candidates.

Some of the problematic comments captured by CCDH included statements such as “legalize rape” and “we don’t want black people around us, no matter who they are,” the report said. One comment directed at Harris mocked her racial background, while another comment called on President Joe Biden to sexually assault her.

The CCDH researchers then used Instagram’s own content reporting tools to flag the 1,000 abusive comments they had manually discovered. A week later, “Instagram had not taken action on 926 of them, representing a failure to act on 93% of them,” the report said.

Meta said in a statement that it would review the examples highlighted by CCDH and remove comments that violate company policies, but added that while some content may be offensive, it does not violate the rules. The company also said the Google AI tool that CCDH relied on for some of its research was not always accurate.

“We provide tools that allow anyone to control who can comment on their posts, automatically filter out offensive comments, phrases or emojis, and automatically hide comments from people who don’t follow them,” said Cindy Southworth, Meta’s head of women’s safety, in a statement. “We work with hundreds of safety partners around the world to continually improve our policies, tools, detection and enforcement, and we will review the CCDH report and take action against any content that violates our policies.”

Regarding the racist comment against Harris, one of the CCDH researchers eventually received an Instagram notification saying the post “did not violate our community guidelines,” the report said. The report also says that over a fifth of the 1,000 offensive comments the researchers flagged were from “repeat offenders” who had posted insults at least twice.

The report on Instagram comes months after a California federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk’s ex against CCDH. The suit was filed shortly after the group released a study showing a rise in hate speech following Musk’s acquisition of the site formerly known as Twitter.

Because of all the negative attention Musk has received, Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have escaped scrutiny recently, giving the impression that Instagram has become “a platform that people feel safe to use,” Ahmed says.

“Mark Zuckerberg’s strategy is to keep a low profile, while X acts as a lightning rod for much of the anger about the toxicity in public life and political discourse,” Ahmed said. “We wanted to look specifically at this platform to see if they are actually backing up their gloating over X’s misfortune with their own actions.”

REGARD: Stef Knight on the Trump/Musk interview.