In India, only around 30% of posts on Instagram and 32.95% on Facebook promoting hate speech were proactively regulated through Meta’s enforcement directives from October to December 2025. This is in stark contrast to Meta proactively actioning 83.9% of Instagram posts and 74% of Facebook posts related to hateful conduct in the same period globally, according to data from Meta’s Transparency Reports and Community Standards Enforcement Report.

Similar worrying gaps in Meta’s enforcement in India are also prevalent in content promoting bullying, harassment, violence, and incitement. India has Meta’s largest user base in the world.

The degree of Meta’s enforcement on different kinds of posts or accounts which contain content violating community standards - ranging from hate speech, drugs, terror, nudity, sexual activity, child endangerment, and more - is measured through the reported ‘proactive rate’, which is disclosed in its transparency reports. Meta describes this ‘proactive rate’ as “the percentage of all content or accounts acted on” before users report them to Meta.

For example, a proactive rate of 30% for hate speech means that out of all the posts Meta took action on related to hate speech, only 30% of those posts were flagged by Meta before they were reported by users.

The graphic below shows the quarterly proactive rates for different violating pieces of content that Meta actioned on over the years and across Facebook and Instagram, which are also two of the largest social media platforms on the internet. The graphic shows that posts falling under the purview of hate speech/hateful conduct, bullying & harassment, and violence & incitement are proactively actioned on much lesser in India than globally.

This, rather, points to Meta’s reactive moderation relying on user flagging rather than it’s proactive automated scanning and removal of harmful content falling under the above-listed three groups; which is not the case with other forms of harmful content that it proactively moderates (like nudity, child endangerment, terrorism), as shown in the graphic above.

The time between a piece of content being flagged by users to when Meta takes action on the post is varied and not revealed in the reports. Thus, in several cases, such detrimental posts can remain on the platform for an extended period of time.

More so, a monthly analysis shows that the proactive rates on content under these three groups are progressively worsening in India since July 2025, across Facebook and Instagram.

The above graphic shows a significant drop in proactive rates of since June 2025. In fact, between June and July 2025, proactive rates for posts related to hate speech and bullying and harassment fell by over 30% in India. Posts related to violence and incitement experienced a similar drop across two months.

As of June 2026, proactive rates for posts related to hate speech and bullying and harassment have fallen to 22.3% and 32.5% on Instagram, respectively, as compared to 82.2% and 85.8% in June 2025. Posts in both these categories are regulated slightly more proactively on Facebook, as shown in the graphic above. This comes six months after Meta revised its policies on ‘hateful conduct’ and ‘bullying and harassment’ in January last year.

In May 2026, proactive rates for posts promoting hate speech in India fell to 8% on Instagram.

Published - August 15, 2026 07:42 pm IST