Instagram has admitted a mistake in its technology meant racist comments and emojis were not removed. Social media giant, Instagram, had to admit the mistake as the gram was flooded with racist abuse that was directed towards England footballers Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford, and Jadon Sancho following the men’s Euro cup 2020 final.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said that “the content had mistakenly been identified as within guidelines instead of referred to human moderators but now, the issue has been fixed.” He also tweeted that “We have the technology to try and prioritize reports and we were mistakenly marking some of these as benign comments, which are absolutely not. The issue has since been addressed. Reports on these types of comments should be reviewed properly.”
On Monday, it was seen that there are several orangutan emojis on Saka’s Instagram account, when the comment was reported within few minutes a notification was popped saying “Found that this comment probably doesn’t go against our guidelines.” Following the same reporting procedure with the other accounts (names mentioned above), there was no notification seen of any review.
Racism on Instagram has been a long-standing issue, with a vast amount of content to moderate. In April, Liverpool Football Club criticized the platform after some of its players were sent racist monkey emojis. Instagram has previously consulted with anti-discrimination and anti-bullying groups to curate a list of offensive terms, phrases, and emojis. Users can also filter out specific words or emojis on their accounts, by changing the Hidden Words tool in settings.