Over half of user reports of harm not dealt with promptly on social media

More than half of legitimate user complaints about content related to child abuse or cyber bullying, among other harms, were not addressed in the first instance by social media companies, Singapore's media regulator has found.

- Osmond Chia

Most social media companies also took an average of five days or more to act on user reports of harmful content. This is considerably longer than what social media companies claimed in their annual reports, said the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) in its inaugural Online Safety Assessment Report published on Feb 17.

The IMDA study assesses how well Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter) and Hardware Zone protect their users, and includes a "mystery shopper" test.

Posing as members of the public between August 2023 and July 2024, IMDA analysts flagged more than 1,000 harmful posts across the six platforms and observed their responses.

Instagram and X performed the poorest.

Instagram acted on only 2 per cent of the user reports raised, taking an average of seven days to respond.

Most of the harmful content was taken down only after Instagram was notified by IMDA.

X took action on just over half of harmful content flagged, and dealt with most of the remaining posts after IMDA notified the platform.

Also, X took an average of seven to nine days to deal with flagged sexual or self-harm material, and up to 20 days for other categories of harmful content, IMDA reported. The findings exceeded the median time, stated by X, of 15 hours to take action on user reports.

Hardware Zone performed the best, responding to nearly nine in 10 cases within roughly three days each.

Harmful content is defined as material that is sexual, violent, related to self-harm, suicide, cyber bullying or vice, or others that can endanger public health.