Meta Inc, the parent company of Facebook, has in an effort to guarantee safety for women in politics and guard against abuse online scaled its profanity filter to block local abusive words that are deemed derogatory to women from its social media platforms.

Meta made the announcement during a capacity-building workshop dubbed; the Women’s Safety Outreach 2022, targeting female Human Rights advocates and Civil Society organizations held in Nairobi on Monday last week.

The team engaged the participants in identifying common local derogatory terms that are used to demean women that Meta can review for inclusion in its profanity filter, which filters out profanities.

A profanity filter is a type of software that scans user-generated content (UGC) to filter out profanity within online communities, social platforms, marketplaces, and more.

The participants were also taken through A Digital Safety Toolkit for Facebook and Instagram and how to Confront Political Violence Against Women.

The profanity filter on Facebook allows users to block certain words from appearing in their comments.

 To turn the profanity filter on or off:

1. Log into Facebook from a computer.
2. From your News Feed, click Pages in the left menu.
3. Go to your Page and click Settings at the top.
4. From General, click Profanity Filter.
5. Next to Profanity Filter, click the box to turn the setting on or off.
6. Click Save.

Women in politics often face barriers that allow them to compete equally with men and the hostility has moved to social media platforms as well. Meta’s move to safeguard female politicians against online abuse comes in the background of the recently released Global Gender Gap report 2021 by the world economic forum, which indicates that the political gender gap is the widest globally and will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.

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