Laura Boldrini, president of Italy’s lower house of parliament, is urging Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) to do much more to remove hate speech from its site, Reuters (via Fortune) reported.
Boldrini added that fake news is fueling rising abuse on various social media sites. She also faced abusive comments on the social networking site.
In November 2016, Boldrini submitted a complaint to Facebook about hate speech on the social network. She offered Facebook managers several proposals on how to deal with the problem.
However, “two months after our meeting, they have done nothing. They have not even written to me about what I said. Good manners would have expected at least a reply,” Boldrini told Reuters.
Boldrini is the third most senior official in Italy, behind the president and the president of the upper house Senate.
She is going to write an open letter to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterating her call for a more effective and timely policing of his site. “His platform risks becoming home to dangerous predators … the company has to take responsibility for this,” she said.
Boldrini mentioned that she is regularly deluged with abuse. At the end of last year, she published a selection of the offending comments.
“Boldrini, you are a handicapped whore,” says one. “Why has no one killed this terrorist,” says another.
Boldrini requested Facebook to open a full office in Italy where the social networking site has 28 million users. Presently, Italian complaints are handled at the company’s European headquarters in Ireland. Boldrini said that she does not know how many of its employees at Ireland office spoke Italian.
In a statement, Facebook said that it is committed to fight hate speech and fake news. The company said that it is working closely with various institutions in Italy to deal with cyber bullying.
In last May, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and other technology and social media companies – Twitter, Google’s YouTube and Microsoft – agreed to an EU code of conduct to tackle online hate speech. They pledged to review the majority of valid requests for removal of illegal abuse within 24 hours in Europe.
However, a report published in December, the European Commission said that only 40% of hate speech was being reviewed within 24 hours, with wide variations from country to country. In Italy, just 4% of hate posts were being removed within a day, according to that report.