Facebook throws open ‘hateful memes’ challenge for researchers to develop algorithms to tackle it

Washington: Facebook unveiled an initiative Tuesday to take on “hateful memes” by using artificial intelligence, backed by crowd sourcing, to identify maliciously motivated posts.

The leading social network said it had already created a database of 10,000 memes—images often blended with text to deliver a specific message—as part of a ramped-up effort against hate speech.

Facebook said it was releasing the database to researchers as part of a “hateful memes challenge” to develop improved algorithms to detect hate-driven visual messages, with a prize pool of $100,000.

“These efforts will spur the broader AI research community to test new methods, compare their work, and benchmark their results in order to accelerate work on detecting multimodal hate speech,” Facebook said in a blog post.

Facebook’s effort comes as it leans more heavily on AI to filter out objectionable content during the coronavirus pandemic that has sidelined most of its human moderators.