Facebook says it's winning the fight against hate speech targeting Black Americans. Its own research says otherwise.

It was viewed “orders of magnitude times more” than the total number of views of hate speech Facebook prevents in a single day, an employee said in an exit memo. .

Even as civil rights leaders and the Black community registered complaint after complaint about Facebook, internal documents reviewed by USA TODAY show that the company continued to combat a relentless wave of racially motivated hate speech with automated moderation tools that are not sophisticated enough to catch most harmful content and are prone to making mistakes.

One Facebook employee estimated that 1 out of every 1,000 pieces of content on the platform are hate speech.

The internal documents are among hundreds disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by attorneys for Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower.

For years, Facebook executives have repeatedly made promises but little progress in protecting the Black community and other often-targeted groups from hate speech and threats that can lead to violence.

In 2019, a Facebook researcher estimated that automated moderation tools removed posts that generated just 2% of the views of hate speech that violated Facebook’s rules.

A more recent Facebook tally in March estimated that automated tools removed posts that generated 3% to 5% of views of hate speech and 0.6% of content that violated Facebook’s rules against violence and incitement, according to another research report.

Facebook says the percentages cited in internal documents refer to hate speech removed using automated tools and do not include other ways the company limits how much hate speech users see, including pushing harmful content lower in news feeds. .

“When combating hate speech on Facebook, our goal is to reduce its prevalence, which is the amount of it that people actually see,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told USA TODAY.

Facebook says nearly all of the hate speech it takes down is discovered by its automated moderation tools before it is reported by users.

But a Facebook employee who worked on efforts to reduce violence and incitement during the 2020 presidential election characterized the company’s progress on rooting out hate speech as incremental and “simply dwarfed by the sheer volume of violating content that there is on Facebook.”.

►Facebook while Black: Black users say they're targeted by hate, threats and censored for talking about racism.

Encountering hate speech and violent threats on Facebook is a daily occurrence for Tanya Faison, founder of the Black Lives Matter chapter in Sacramento .

Faison says Facebook’s hate speech policies and content moderation systems fail the people the company claims it's trying to protect

Yet Black voices speaking out against racism are routinely stifled and Facebook rarely takes action on racial slurs, violent threats and harassment campaigns targeting Black users, Faison says

Looking to reel in costs, Facebook cut the number of hours that moderators spent reviewing hate speech, the internal documents show. 

Stone, the Facebook spokesman, said the funds were shifted to personnel who trained Facebook’s algorithms to identify hate speech and that the overall budget did not change

The process for Facebook users to report hate speech also became more cumbersome, which reduced the number of complaints made, according to the documents

Stone said that research helped the company realize it had made reporting hate speech too difficult for Facebook users so the company reduced the number of steps it requires

For users, the flood of hate speech and other objectionable or harmful content is ruining the Facebook experience, according to research the company conducted

A Facebook research report from 2019 found a major gap between what Facebook says violates its rules and what users find harmful, objectionable or problematic

Three-quarters of the users said they were not happy with the content they see on Facebook. More than one-quarter of participants reported seeing hate speech multiple times per day, and Facebook found it was “more frequent in users’ feeds.”