Facebook docs detail issues with moderating non-English speech, leading to inflammatory language in Afghanistan, bans on common words in Palestine, and more
but Facebook doesn't have people who speak all those languages to adequately monitor for hate speech and harassment. https://www.cnn.com/... DK Shivakumar / @dkshivakumar : This is absolutely disturbing and unacceptable, that India has been made a market to perpetrate hate by incumbent govt as highlighted by an investigation. The use of social media to wreak havoc on our nation's democracy puts a serious question mark on the credibility of Facebook. https://twitter.com/... Rep. Ken Buck / @repkenbuck : Facebook has known for years it has a human trafficking problem. They have never fully fixed it. Why is Facebook allowing human traffickers to use their platform? https://www.cnn.com/... Don Winslow / @donwinslow : CNN headline 10/25/21 4:08pm ET: “Leaked records show Facebook knew its platforms were used for HUMAN TRAFFICKING, spreading EXTREMISM and INCITING VIOLENCE” Now can you PLEASE delete your Facebook account? Andy Stone / @andymstone : @JessicaHuseman WhatsApp did not propose pushing info to all users because that's not how WhatsApp works. WhatsApp DID launch a campaign in Spanish and English, with partners at @votedotorg and @factchecknet, to encourage voter registration and raise awareness about misinformation. @isdglobal : Our @MoustafaAyad is quoted in this article based on the latest leaked documents from Facebook. They show a systematic failure to recruit sufficient native speakers of Arabic, among other languages, to moderate the platform in the MENA region. https://twitter.com/... Bruna Martins dos Santos / @boomartins : This is another article that reinforces the narrative that war-torn or lower income countries was never at the top of the interest of Facebook. The majority of policy discussions were always been done at the US-EU level and only for such countries. https://twitter.com/... Erin Gallagher / @3r1ng : omfg they flagged inoffensive Arabic posts as terrorist content 77% of the time what 🤯 “Bringing the world closer together” (except the Arabic-speaking world apparently which gets Zucked) https://twitter.com/... Senator Alex Padilla / @senalexpadilla : Providing key voting information in Spanish isn't partisan. In fact, Spanish language misinformation continues to run rampant online. This is part of a disturbing pattern of behavior and concerning reports about Facebook. Congress must get to the bottom of it. https://twitter.com/...
The disclosure also arrives alongside evidence of missed violence-inciting content in India, making inadequate local-language review a credibility problem for Facebook across multiple politically sensitive markets.
First-order effects
Facebook’s insufficient native Arabic-language moderation produces two immediate errors: inflammatory content can evade review while ordinary Palestinian language is wrongly treated as terrorist material.
Indian politicians gain documentary support for claims that Facebook failed to address hate-related activity, intensifying the company’s credibility problem in India.
Second-order effects
Facebook must allocate more moderation capacity to local-language and regional-context review, rather than relying on policies that misclassify common Arabic terms or miss harmful speech.
Congress and other officials criticizing Facebook’s trafficking, extremism, and misinformation failures gain a broader record of operational shortcomings to scrutinize.
Third-order effects
If the documented pattern persists, platform-safety performance will increasingly be judged market by market: a single global rule set will not be credible without native-language expertise and local context.
Content moderation is shifting from a narrow enforcement question toward an accountability issue in which underinvestment in regional operations can produce both censorship and violence-related harms.
The trend: Global platforms are being pressed to match the reach of their services with locally competent moderation, especially where language and political context determine whether enforcement protects or harms users.
Facebook has the ability to curb hate speech, misinformation, & violence on its platform, but it refuses to do so. Instead, it chooses to exploit this content for profit at the expense of the people & our democracy. It's time to rein in this abuse. https://www.washingtonpost.com/…
.@Facebook researchers showed they could reduce COVID disinfo by 38% & Zuckeberg nixed it cuz it would hurt engagement: “We wouldn't launch if there was a material trade-off with MSI.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Thread on the new FB stories: I want to begin by saying that Indian researchers have been saying this for a long time. In English. @gvrkiran 's brilliant data-driven work, including for eg. https://dl.acm.org/... 2 essays I wrote: https://medium.com/... https://papers.ssrn.com/..…
Publicly, Mark Zuckerberg styled himself a champion of free speech. Privately, he personally made the call to censor anti-government dissidents in Vietnam rather than risk losing access to a lucrative market. https://t.co/GVJz6A8Gnq https://t.co/ZhuoRDJ7L1
Zuckerberg thought pushing out a spanish language edition of FB's “voting information center” on WhatsApp was not “politically neutral.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Facebook execs were so worried about being accused of having a liberal bias that they developed a powerful rightward tilt. This is why the wingnuts work the refs. https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/...
I combed through thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents. My overwhelming takeaway: The hate, abuse, and misinformation we see in the U.S. is only a fraction of what the ~90 percent of Facebook users in the rest of the world experience. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... …
Agree. The absolutely diabolical impact of Facebook on India is what's stuck most clearly in my brain too. The overlaps between authoritarianism & violence & hatred & Facebook are so clear & stark https://twitter.com/...
I spoke to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg days after Trump posted about “looting” and “shooting” to warn them that this post would incite violence against Black people - I was told we were overstating our concern and that the post would stay up. https://www.usatoday.com/...
Facebook in a memo: Social media turns traditional top-down control of info on its head Facebook IRL: When Vietnam asked FB to censor anti-govt dissents, “Zuckerberg personally decided that Facebook would comply with Hanoi's demand” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twi…
How can they keep doing this, again & again? (Internal documents found) “almost no people who spoke Yemini Arabic inside the content moderation team even as that country's civil war was escalating and Facebook had highlighted Yemen as a top priority.” https://twitter.com/...
On the day of the Sadr City bombing, ahead of Eid, @ISDglobal watched Islamic State networks coordinate a campaign across three platforms. Their hub was Facebook. This was just one of many battles in the war for terrorist footholds on the platform. 🧵 https://www.politico.com/...
THREAD: Facebook once faced the threat of being removed from Apple's app store over maids being bought and traded on its websites, documents obtained by the @AP show. #TheFacebookPapers https://apnews.com/...
Facebook has failed to implement adequate safeguards for its millions of non-english speaking users, as a result it continues to act as a platform that allows the spread of hateful content. #BJPRSSfakebook https://twitter.com/...
Just last week CNN reporters were able to, rather easily it seems, find human trafficking on Instagram. #FacebookPapers https://www.cnn.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Providing key voting information in Spanish isn't partisan. In fact, Spanish language misinformation continues to run rampant online. This is part of a disturbing pattern of behavior and concerning reports about Facebook. Congress must get to the bottom of it. https://twitter.com…
@WillOremus So now can we finally put to rest the false notion that Zuckerberg is a champion of free speech & that Facebook has ever been about a deep desire to promote free expression? Power, growth, domination are his ideologies. Time to stop diagnosing & start figuring out rea…
Facebook: Sure, Middle Eastern dictatorships engage in slavery. On the other hand...wait, actually we don't care. They can use our service without fear of reprisal. https://twitter.com/...
Facebook is available in more than 100 languages — but Facebook doesn't have people who speak all those languages to adequately monitor for hate speech and harassment. https://www.cnn.com/...
Facebook has known for years it has a human trafficking problem. They have never fully fixed it. Why is Facebook allowing human traffickers to use their platform? https://www.cnn.com/...
CNN headline 10/25/21 4:08pm ET: “Leaked records show Facebook knew its platforms were used for HUMAN TRAFFICKING, spreading EXTREMISM and INCITING VIOLENCE” Now can you PLEASE delete your Facebook account?
omfg they flagged inoffensive Arabic posts as terrorist content 77% of the time what 🤯 “Bringing the world closer together” (except the Arabic-speaking world apparently which gets Zucked) https://twitter.com/...
@JessicaHuseman WhatsApp did not propose pushing info to all users because that's not how WhatsApp works. WhatsApp DID launch a campaign in Spanish and English, with partners at @votedotorg and @factchecknet, to encourage voter registration and raise awareness about misinformatio…
Our @MoustafaAyad is quoted in this article based on the latest leaked documents from Facebook. They show a systematic failure to recruit sufficient native speakers of Arabic, among other languages, to moderate the platform in the MENA region. https://twitter.com/...
This is another article that reinforces the narrative that war-torn or lower income countries was never at the top of the interest of Facebook. The majority of policy discussions were always been done at the US-EU level and only for such countries. https://twitter.com/...
#Ethiopia: Facebook knew it was being used to incite violence in Ethiopia. It did little to stop the spread, documents show https://cnn.com/... ... documents reveal that Facebook's moderation efforts were no match for the flood of inflammatory content on its platform.
33/ @CaseyNewton has a very interesting piece on a Facebook tier list that decides which countries need protection, the lack of misinformation classifier in high risk countries, and a lack of multilingual speech classifiers, among other issues https://www.theverge.com/...
“The root problem is that [Facebook] was never built with the intention it would one day mediate the political speech of everyone in the world,” said Eliza Campbell, director of the Middle East Institute's Cyber Program. https://apnews.com/...