While the war in Gaza raged in May last year, Instagram suddenly began removing all posts tagged the word Al Aqsa. A censorship that seemed incomprehensible as Al Aqsa is just the mosque located in the Old City of Jerusalem.
«Facebook papers»
This is just one of many examples that are highlighted after the leak of “Facebook papers”. The news agency AP goes through how poorly adapted the moderation system is when it comes to dealing with many different languages and dialects.
Facebook, which owns Instagram, had to apologize for the censorship in this case, explaining that their automated moderation systems crashed because it confused the Islamic shrine with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is an Islamist group.
The leaked documents show that the problem goes deeper than some handy accidents. They also show that Facebook has understood the scope of the problem for years without doing anything about it.
Journalists are banned
Prominent Palestinian journalist Hassan Slaieh has been active on Facebook for many years. There he has shared stories with Palestinians, photos and articles.
He says it felt like a blow to the stomach the first time he saw the message from Facebook: “Your account has been permanently deleted for violating Facebook’s policies.” This was during the Gaza war in 2014.
He lost everything he had uploaded on Facebook in the last six years, personal memories and not least 200,000 followers.
Since then, he has had to restart 17 times. He has tried to adapt to the automatic moderation by avoiding certain Arabic words such as “martyr” or “prisoner”, he has written about posts that refer to Israeli occupation, or various military groups, but it did not work. Eventually, he was banned from Facebook.
He himself believes that Facebook has banned him because he did his job.
Languages and dialects
In both Gaza and Syria, journalists and activists believe they are being censored after many of their posts have been flagged as terrorist content.
Arabic is one of the most used languages on Facebook, but 30 different Arabic dialects and automated systems are a bad combination. Other languages in Asia are similarly vulnerable, but the distinction between American and British English is also problematic for Facebook’s automated systems.
On Monday, witnesses warn Frances Haugen in the British Parliament. There she talks about the challenges that Facebook has not addressed.
– Facebook alerts Frances Haugen Photo: AFP
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The Facebook papers document leak consists of internal company information from the giant in social media. It comes from Frances Haugen, whistleblower and former product manager at Facebook. She has previously also shared large amounts of documents with The Wall Street Journal.
A spokesperson from Facebook says that they have worked to develop skills in languages and cultures around the world, but that they have a job to do when it comes to Arabic.
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