A world of online hate and lies: Mapping our investigations

This report synthesizes more than a dozen Global Witness country-level investigations into how Facebook, YouTube, X and TikTok enforce their own hate-speech and disinformation policies. The underlying methodology across these tests involved submitting advertisements containing real-world examples of extreme hate speech or election disinformation to see whether platforms would approve them for publication; ads were withdrawn before going live in every case, and reviewers were given ample opportunity to detect the violations.

Across the pooled investigations, the organization found systemic and repeated failures to enforce platforms' own content rules, with markedly weaker moderation performance outside the United States than within it — evidence, in Global Witness's assessment, that companies prioritize resourcing US markets over others. The report accompanies an interactive map allowing comparison of results by country and platform.

Global Witness concludes that underinvestment in content moderation and user safety, set against a backdrop of dozens of elections held globally in 2024, creates conditions in which hate speech and disinformation can spread largely unchecked, and frames the pattern as reflecting platforms' prioritization of profitability over consistent global enforcement of stated policies.