Facebook, in response to the attention drawn to its failure to recognize and censor gender-based hate speech, issued a statement yesterday.

They wrote:

“In recent days, it has become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate. In some cases, content is not being removed as quickly as we want.  In other cases, content that should be removed has not been or has been evaluated using outdated criteria. We have been working over the past several months to improve our systems to respond to reports of violations, but the guidelines used by these systems have failed to capture all the content that violates our standards. We need to do better – and we will.”

There’s still a lot of contention over what should and shouldn’t be censored on Facebook, and we’ll see how the implementation goes, but this seems like a good first step.

Read more here.