Muzzling Arab political discourse Facebook scandal or language gap

Facebook tells us we're breaking the rules, but no one tells us those rules.

Facebook's failures spark controversy

The confusion of Facebook's algorithms between Islam's third holiest site and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade was neither the first nor the last, as internal company documents show that the problems are much more systematic than a few simple mistakes. Linguistics experts ask, is it possible, in the face of 30 Arabic dialects, for example, to determine where terrorism begins and where it ends?

As the Gaza war raged and tensions escalated across the Middle East last May, Instagram briefly banned the hashtag Al-Aqsa Mosque, which has been an important point in the dispute.

Facebook, which owns Instagram, later apologized, explaining that its algorithms mixed the third holiest site in Islam with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Fatah.

To many Arabic-speaking users, this was just the latest powerful example of the social media giant's stifling of political discourse in the region. Arabic is one of the most popular languages ​​on Facebook's platforms, and the company issues frequent public apologies after similar failed content removals.

Francis Hogan: Facebook understood the depth of the failures and did nothing about it

consecutive failures

Internal company documents from Facebook's former product manager turned whistleblower Frances Hogan show that the problems are much more systemic than just a few simple bugs, and that Facebook has understood the depth of these failures for years while doing little about them.

Such errors are not limited to the Arabic language; The filings revealed that in some of the world's most volatile regions, terrorist content and hate speech are rife because the company still lacks intermediaries who speak local languages ​​and understand cultural contexts. Its platforms fail to develop artificial intelligence solutions that can detect malicious content in different languages.

These loopholes have allowed inflammatory language to flourish on the platform in countries like Afghanistan and Myanmar, while Facebook suppresses normal speech in Syria and the Palestinian territories, with blanket bans on common words.

“The fundamental problem is that the platform was not built to one day mediate the political discourse of everyone in the world,” said Elisa Campbell, director of the Cyber ​​Program at the Middle East Institute. But moderation is a bewilderingly under-resourced project, especially with the amount of political importance and resources Facebook has.”

This story, along with other recently published stories, is based on Hogan's statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which its legal team also revised before submitting it to Congress. News organizations reviewed the revised versions received by Congress. It is reported that similar reports from the Wall Street Journal were based on the same documents.

A Facebook spokesperson said that over the past two years the company has invested in hiring more staff with local expertise to strengthen its worldwide auditing capacity.

But when it came to modifying Arabic content, the company said, "We still have more work to do we are conducting research to better understand this complexity and determine how to address it."

Facebook is overly dependent on AI filters which leads to a lot of false alarms and harsh reactions

The company acknowledged in its internal reports that it had failed to stop the spread of hate speech targeting the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar, where disinformation on Facebook has been repeatedly linked to ethnic and religious violence.

The persecution of the Rohingya - which the United States has described as ethnic cleansing - prompted Facebook to publicly pledge in 2018 that it would recruit 100 native Myanmar speakers to monitor its platforms. But the company has never revealed how many content moderators it eventually hired or any of the many dialects in the countries it covers.

Despite Facebook's public promises and numerous internal reports of these problems, rights group Global Witness said the company's recommendation algorithm continued to amplify military propaganda and other content that violated the company's policies in Myanmar after the military coup in February.

In India, documents show Facebook employees discussing last March whether they could crack down on the "fear promotion and anti-Muslim narratives" that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ultra-nationalist organization broadcasts on its platform.

Arabic poses challenges to Facebook's automated systems as everyone struggles to understand the dialects of every country and region

In one document, the company noted that users associated with Modi's party had created multiple accounts to further spread anti-Islamic content. The research found that much of this content was "unreported and action taken" because Facebook lacks automated moderators and filters with knowledge of Hindi and Bengali.

The Arabic language poses particular challenges to Facebook's automated systems and human moderators, as each struggles to understand the unique spoken dialects of each country and region, with its vocabulary shaped by different historical factors and cultural contexts.

Moroccan colloquial Arabic includes, for example, French and Berber words. Egyptian Arabic on the other hand includes some Turkish terms. Other dialects are closer to the "official" version of the Qur'an. Arabs themselves cannot understand all of these dialects in some cases, and there is no standard way to write colloquial Arabic.

Facebook first developed a massive following in the Middle East during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, and users saw the platform as a rare opportunity for free expression and an important source of news in a region where authoritarian governments exercise strict controls on both. But that reputation has changed in recent years.

The company deleted the accounts of dozens of Palestinian journalists and activists. The archives of the Syrian civil war have disappeared. Everyday vocabulary is now off-limits to Arabic speakers, the third most popular language on Facebook and used by millions of people around the world.

Failed Tactics

Repeated mistakes create a huge waste of resources

For Hassan Asleih, a prominent journalist in the besieged Gaza Strip, the first message was a huge blow. "Your account has been permanently disabled for violating Facebook's Community Standards," the company's notice read. It was at the height of the bloody 2014 Gaza war, years after his news posts about violence between Israel and Hamas were classified as content violations.

He lost everything he had collected over six years in a matter of moments: personal memories, stories of people's lives in Gaza, photos of Israeli air strikes bombing the Strip, as well as his 200,000 followers. The most recent removal of his Facebook page last year was not a shock; As this was the seventeenth time he had to start from scratch.

And try to be smarter. And he learned, like many Palestinians, to avoid the words “martyr” and “prisoner,” along with references to the Israeli military occupation. It adds symbols or spaces between each letter if armed groups are mentioned.

Other users in the region have taken an increasingly clever approach to trick Facebook's algorithms, using centuries-old Arabic script that lacks the dots and tags that help readers distinguish between matching characters. According to the internal documents, the writing style - which was common before learning the Arabic language was popularized following the spread of Islam - has circumvented the censorship imposed on hate speech on Facebook and Instagram.

Hossam Zomlot: If you silence people's voices, the alternatives will be worse

But the journalist's tactics did not work. He is believed to have been banned by Facebook simply for doing his job. His work as a reporter in Gaza includes publishing pictures of injured Palestinian demonstrators on the Israeli border, mothers crying on their children's coffins, and statements from the Hamas movement that rules the Gaza Strip. For the company, criticism, and even simple references to groups on the “dangerous individuals and organizations” list, are reasons for deleting the pages.

And one of the documents stated, “We were improperly imposing anti-terrorism content in the Arabic language,” that the current system “restricts users’ participation in political discourse, which impedes their right to freedom of expression.”

The Facebook blacklist includes Hamas in Gaza as well as Hezbollah, which holds seats in Lebanon's parliament, along with several other groups representing broad swathes of people and lands across the Middle East - internal documents show - resulting in what employees consider Facebook in the documents censorship perceptions are widespread.

“If you post about militant activity without a clear condemnation of what is happening, we will treat you as if you supported it,” said May Al-Mahdi, a former Facebook employee who worked on editing Arabic content.

In response to questions from the Associated Press, Facebook said it consults independent experts to develop its moderation policies and goes to great lengths to ensure they are neutral in religion, region, political outlook or ideology. "We know our systems are not perfect," he added. The company's lacunae and language biases led to a widespread perception that its auditors leaned in favor of governments and against minorities.

Former Facebook employees also say that various governments are putting pressure on the company, threatening regulations and fines. Israel, the lucrative source of Facebook's advertising revenue, is the only country in the Middle East where Facebook operates a national office. Its director of public policy served as an advisor to former right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israeli security services monitor Facebook and bombard it with thousands of orders calling on it to delete Palestinian accounts and posts during the crackdown on protests.

“They are flooding our system, completely overpowering it,” said Ashraf Zeitoun, the former head of Middle East and North Africa policy at Facebook, who left in 2017. This forces the regime to make mistakes in favor of Israel. Nowhere else in the region has had such a deep understanding of how Facebook works.”

Facebook said in a statement that it receives removal requests from governments not unlike those from rights organizations or members of communities, although it may restrict access to content based on local laws. "Any suggestion that we only remove content under pressure from the Israeli government is wholly inaccurate," he added.

What are the rules?

Facebook in the eye of the storm

Syrian journalists and activists covering opposition news in the country have complained of censorship, with cyber armies supporting President Bashar al-Assad reporting opposition content for removal.

"Facebook always tells us that we are breaking the rules, but no one tells us these rules," said Raed, who worked as a reporter at the Aleppo Media Center - a group of anti-government activists - who gave only his first name for fear of reprisals.

When it came to looking at abuse of domestic workers in the Middle East, internal Facebook documents acknowledged that engineers focus primarily on posts and messages written in English.

Sophie Zhang, a Facebook employee turned whistleblower who worked for the company for nearly three years before she was fired last year, said that contractors at Facebook's office in Ireland complained to her that they had to rely on Google Translator because the company didn't assign them content in the languages ​​they wanted. They know her.

Facebook outsources most of its content editing to giant companies that recruit workers in faraway places, from Casablanca in Morocco to Essen in Germany. Companies do not sponsor work visas for Arab teams, limiting the group to local employees. One document says they often get lost in translating 30 different Arabic dialects, referring to non-offensive Arabic publications as terrorist content at 77 percent.

Iraq ranks first in the region in terms of the reported volume of hate speech on Facebook. One of the documents said that the understanding of the Iraqi dialect among the auditors is very weak. Linguists have described Facebook's system as flawed for a region with a great diversity of colloquial dialects, which Arab speakers transmit in different ways.

Facebook's blacklist includes Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, along with many other groups

Despite these problems, intermediaries are on the front lines, making Facebook a powerful medium for political expression in a turbulent region. “The stereotype that the Arabic language is one entity is a big problem,” said Inam Elwer, a professor of Arabic linguistics at the University of Essex. to the “enormous differences” in language not only between countries but also between class, gender, religion and ethnicity.

Although the documents from Hogan date from before the Gaza war, episodes of that 11-day conflict show how little has been done to address the problems reported in Facebook's own internal reports.

Facebook reported in internal documents that it erred in nearly half of all Arabic takedown requests submitted for appeal. He said frequent mistakes "create a massive drain on resources".

Facebook's internal documents also stressed the need to "enhance" the algorithms, recruiting more Arab moderators from under-represented countries, and confining them to places where they have the appropriate dialect expertise.

The report said that "with the size of the Arab user base and the potential risk of harm offline...it is certain that more resources should be devoted to the task of improving Arab systems." But the company lamented that "there is no single clear strategy".

At the same time, many across the Middle East are concerned that the risks of Facebook's failures are exceptionally high, with the potential to widen long-standing inequality, reduce civic activism, and fuel violence in the region.

“We said to Facebook: Do you want people to report their experiences on social platforms, or do you want to silence them?” said Palestinian envoy to the UK Husam Zomlot, who recently discussed blocking Arabic content with Facebook officials in London. If you silence people’s voices, the alternatives will be worse.” (Isabelle Debre and Faris Akram)