BuzzFeed: “As votes are being tallied across the country to determine the next US president, internal Facebook data shows that the company has seen a significant increase in what it calls ‘violence and incitement trends.’ In a post to a group on Facebook’s internal message board, one employee alerted their colleagues to a nearly 45% increase in the metric, which assesses the potential for danger based on hashtags and search terms, over the last five days. The post, which was seen by BuzzFeed News, notes that trends were previously rising ‘slowly,’ but that recently ‘some conspiracy theory and general unhappiness posts/hashtags’ were gaining popularity.”
“‘The ‘probable violence and incitement’ metric for explore has been slowly rising over the last few days,’ the post’s author wrote, referring to Facebook’s ‘Explore’ search tool. ‘The risky hashtags seem conspiracy-theory-esque.’ The internal metric, which has not previously been reported, had been at around a score of 400 on Oct. 31. It rose to a 24-hour average of nearly 580 as of Thursday morning.”