10 ms·

Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster

114 points by donohoe 5y ago

_bfhp 5y ago
> hate speech and disinformation targeting at-risk users such as women and the LGBTQ+ community are left rampant on the platform And Israelis too! Or is it Palestinians who are at-risk. Oh well, I'm sure the moderators will sort that one out
chespinoza 5y ago
I think the same happens for every other language but English, in the past I've reported several abusive attacks/ posts/comments in facebook (in Spanish) and later they've said that they don't see any issue, so clearly they just don't understand what you're reporting.
bongoman37 5y ago
This is true for all other languages. Hindi language content on Facebook is pretty much unmoderated with all that you can expect from it.
Jiro 5y ago
This is just another case of "police cracks down on Mafia" when it's one section of the Mafia turning in another disfavored section of the Mafia to the police. I've yet to see a recent complaint about inconsistent and discriminatory Facebook censorship say that Facebook should just stop censoring. It's always "Facebook isn't doing enough to censor against the right and in favor of black people and LGBTQ".
- ben_w 5y ago
  I see plenty of right wing politicians and commentators (and also, though not recently, my extremely left wing ex) complaining that it was censoring their political views unfairly. Very recently, I have even seen some call for an end to algorithmic timelines, though ironically I can’t find a link.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    Here's an article about the "Filter Bubble Transparency Act" which intends "that internet platforms give users the option to engage with a platform without being manipulated by algorithms driven by user-specific data": https://www.makeuseof.com/filter-bubble-transparency-act-explained/ https://www.makeuseof.com/filter-bubble-transparency-act-exp...
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  >the right [...] black people and LGBTQ A clever elision of what each group mentioned is actually saying... Which one is most like the Mafia, I wonder?
  - Jiro 5y ago
    When one Mafia family turns another one in, they're doing it to get back at the other family--they're not doing it because they think that crime is a bad thing. They're perfectly happy with crime, as long as they are the ones committing the crime. It's the exact same thing for censorship. The people who are complaining about Facebook censorship don't want to end censorship. It's just that they want to be the ones doing the censoring.
    - revolvingocelot 5y ago
      Comparing Facebook to the cops and ideologically aligned groups of users to Mafia families is a strange analogy. Not sure why you chose it, except maybe to imply things. One of the things that your analogy implies is that speech is criminal. Many, including the actual cops, believe certain kinds of speech indeed are. But who is saying what?
      - Jiro 5y ago
        No, the analogy is that censorship is criminal. We have one set of criminals (people complaining about Facebook) wanting to turn in another set of criminals (crackdown on Facebook censorship) so that they're the only criminals around (they want to be in control of the censorship). They don't actually want to stop crime (they don't actually want to stop censorship).
        revolvingocelot 5y ago
        >No, the analogy is that censorship is criminal No, that's not right. Above, you likened cops to Facebook and groups of users to Mafia families who tattle on the crime of other families in order to stymie them. The Mafia does crime, while groups of users do speech; the cops catch and punish crime, while Facebook censors speech. The "only criminals around" won't be in control of the censorship unless you're suggesting that a group of users is going to unilaterally take over Facebook. ...Are you? Which one?
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  If this is true in your experience, you ought broaden your horizons on the topic. If nothing else, there are certainly plenty of complaints about facially-reasonable-ish policies being implemented in an insane and incoherent manner — like when Facebook or Google take down "extremist content," but it's like video archives of extremists intended to be used to fight war crimes and bring their perpetrators to justice. e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/facebook-algorithms-are-making-it-harder/588931/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/facebook-a... (Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes / Algorithms that take down “terrorist” videos could hamstring efforts to bring human-rights abusers to justice.) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-socialmedia-rights-trfn/lost-memories-war-crimes-evidence-threatened-by-ai-moderation-idUSKBN23Q2TO https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-socialmedia-rights... ("'Lost memories': War crimes evidence threatened by AI moderation") https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21664951/facebook-ban-stolen-artifacts-aids-criminal-organizations https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21664951/facebook-ban-st... ("Facebook is deleting evidence of war crimes, researchers say / A ban on selling stolen artifacts is having unintended consequences)
  - Jiro 5y ago
    Of course Facebook censorship is insane and incoherent. But pretty much no widely publicized complaint about these ever says "Facebook censorship is insane and incoherent, so Facebook should stop censoring". They just want to be the ones in control of the censorship instead.
    - dale_glass 5y ago
      If you don't moderate content, everything turns into 4chan. And for those two want that, 4chan already exists.
    - elashri 5y ago
      One example of allowing everything is the mass murder of New Zealand mosque that was live streamed on Facebook, do you say that something like that should be allowed and Facebook cannot censor any content?
baybal2 5y ago
I knew a Saudi student who went to a hunting trip in Canada, posted a video of them speaking Arabic with guns, and got permabanned on fb. It was in 2010. Social media companies were said to be making a lot of employment in North Africa just because they were obliged by EU to mow down "terrorist" content long before IS, and they need megatons of Arabic speakers just for that. It came to my mind, maybe underpaid Moroccans, and Tunisians just didn't like rich Saudi kids having good time?
petercooper 5y ago
Not as serious as the "Al-Aqsa" issue in the post, but if you post a picture of Momo, a sculpture by a Japanese artist, to your own timeline, you get a two day block. I think a lot of their moderation system might be a bundle of crude if-statements thrown up to put out temporary fires they're dealing with.
- m10y 5y ago
  The Momo thing was a pretty big deal -- Just calling it a random Japanese sculpture is ignoring everything that happened around it on various social media outlets. I can understand why Facebook would remove references to it pretty much forever. Its fame was never tied to anything but the controversy. Are there other examples of autobans that are more egregious? Just curious.
  - fennecfoxen 5y ago
    https://www.insider.com/momo-challenge-hoax-japanese-sculpture-mother-bird-2019-3 https://www.insider.com/momo-challenge-hoax-japanese-sculptu... > The sculpture appears to be Aisawa's interpretation of the Japanese folklore character, Ubume, the representation of the ghost of a woman who died during childbirth ... parents started claiming the image was popping up in YouTube videos, instructing children to kill themselves and keep the clips secret from parents ... There were no screenshots or recordings of such appearances, but the hoax was spread by celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Kehlani.
    - ronsor 5y ago
      > hoax was spread by celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Kehlani > listening to celebrities That's your real problem right there.
      - pphysch 5y ago
        With the important caveat that most American politicians and intellectuals are essentially celebrities -- they are not focused on governance or discovery but rather on promoting and monetizing their personal image & power, because that's what our society incentivizes. Someone who blindly follows the Kardashians is not necessarily worse off epistemically than someone who blindly follows Biden/Trump/AOC/Boebert or the Experts on NPR/Fox/CBS/HN.
api 5y ago
If they do it through translation it'd be hilarious. When we get tech support queries in languages like Arabic we pass them through Google Translate and the result always makes me think of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grA5XmBRC6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grA5XmBRC6g
jklinger410 5y ago
Moderating is so hard it will probably the first application for AI with generalized intelligence.
- rektide 5y ago
  It feels like an impossible goal.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Moderation or AGI?
    - ascii232425 5y ago
      Why not both?
- throwuxiytayq 5y ago
  > Controlling humans will probably the first application for AI with generalized intelligence. Sounds good to me. Let's do it. Can we get Zuckerberg on the line?
- Ajedi32 5y ago
  Personally I think it feels kinda dystopian for an AI to be deciding what human beings are allowed to say; _especially_ if it's highly effective. There was a comment from another user I favorited a while back which reflects my thoughts on the topic of AI-driven moderation pretty well[1]: > I find censorship via algorithms extremely scary. There will be false positives and false negatives and there is absolutely zero recourse. Censorship by algorithms is a perfect expression of bureaucracy. In perfect bureaucracies, responsibilty is spread so thinly that it's impossible to determine who is responsible for a mistake. With algorithms, there's actually no human on the hook at all. Are you going to blame the programmers? > By all means, use machine learning to flag posts so humans can look at them. But automating the removal of content and the banning of human users is a road I strongly suspect we will regret going down. If the volume of content is sufficient so that you need to use algorithms to remove human-generated content then I'd say it's time to reconsider whether that content should be removed at all. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867975
josh_fyi 5y ago
Why does it say in an article about Arabic, "In Afghanistan, where hate speech is reportedly one of the top 'abuse categories.'..." Arabic is not spoke in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, there is common ignorant generalization that Arabic is the language of Iran, Afghanistan, and other Muslim countries. To those who live there, the distinction is not insignificant. This also casts doubt on the veracity of everything else in this article.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  Some language nerdiness: Persian (Farsi), and main languages of Afghanistan (Pashto and Tajik) are all indo-european, so the same language family as Indian Subcontinent and (most) European languages. Arabic is from a whole different family tree of Semitic languages, which also includes Hebrew and Maltese (go figure). They are totally different to indo-european languages.
  - GravitasFailure 5y ago
    >...family tree of Semitic languages, which also includes...Maltese Okay. I did NOT see that one coming. In retrospect they're not exactly far from other Arabic-speaking countries, but I'm curious what the history is. I've also heard that Sicilian retains some features that differentiates it from Italian and suggests different roots, so I wonder if there's a connection there with Maltese.
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      Malta was conquered by North African Islamic caliphate around ~800AD, and then 200 years later the Normans(yes, those normans weren't just invading England around the year 1000) came in and took it, and then 200 years after that they kicked the Muslims out. By that point the Arabic that the original invaders brought was the common language, and it developed independently from the Arabic spoken in North Africa, slowly becoming latinized by the Christian Normans.
      - GravitasFailure 5y ago
xutopia 5y ago
In French it's horrible as well. They have such a naive approach it is ridiculous. One word that keeps getting banned is "pédale" which means pedal but was also used as a slur till maybe the 90s in France. Some people getting banned because they want to sell their guitar pedal... pretty ridiculous.
- l5870uoo9y 5y ago
  Know the etymology behind "pédale"?
  - malka 5y ago
    It comes from 'pédé' which is slur for 'pédéraste', which means a man who has sex with other men
    - aorth 5y ago
      Rather, a man who is engaged in an erotic relationship with an adolescent boy.
      - Dma54rhs 5y ago
        At least in Eastern Europe the word was used as a synonym for both during the communism, or well at the time there was no difference between the two (piderast/pederast etc)
- gigglesupstairs 5y ago
  In Hindi, they don’t care. Most of Facebook’s focus is US where it is based and held liable more often.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  You get a two day block for saying "ritale". I also got a two a two day block for using the word "japs" in the context of talking about atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Rape of Nanking. Wouldn't want to be offending long dead mass murderers, would we.
Ajedi32 5y ago
I'm starting to think centralized moderation is just a bad idea in general for sites of Facebook's size and reach. It doesn't scale well, can't easily adapt to other cultures, and has all sorts of problems with neutrality and subjectivity that are inherent to the very idea of centralized control. Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with crowdsourced moderation via downvotes and flags, community-appointed moderators and the like, though it's true those systems come with their own set problems. A truly decentralized system where each user chooses their own moderation system could be even better in my opinion, at least in theory, but we're some ways off from that being viable from a practical perspective.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ehutch79 5y ago
  It helps, but you still have to deal with groups that are intentionally toxic or problematic.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    Moderating the moderators seems like a much more tractable problem than moderating all the messages. In Reddit's case, that means shutting down subreddits that trigger too many complaints from people outside those subreddits (in particular, from news articles and advertisers).
  - _bfhp 5y ago
    At what point did we retire the option of convincing people to stop being hateful? I didn't get the memo. It seems we want to ban whatever groups are considered "hateful" (but not the oppressed expressing their anger at the oppressor! Such an easy distinction to make) eventually leading to what, legal bans on speech?
- dannyr 5y ago
  So imagine what will happen when Facebook launches its metaverse!
annadane 5y ago
The moderation would be one thing if there could be an argument that the platform generally acts in good faith, but they don't. They seem to both have the Google problem that you absolutely can not reach anyone if you get banned by accident (and bye bye to your social graph if that happens, which is made all the worse because they insist on integrating all their services into one like IG/WA) and they also don't ban things that are reported and which ought to be banned
bostonsre 5y ago
Can you imagine what a dystopian sci-fi hell hole the metaverse could be with facebook at the helm? They can't even moderate a website.. the hubris is pretty amazing.
- handrous 5y ago
  Their business model depends on operating in a way that's nearly impossible to effectively moderate, and abusive (see all the stories about what Facebook moderators have to see) to try. The only way to fix the problem is to... not operate the business that way, since it's fundamentally a bad idea, considered from that perspective. Which would effectively mean the death of the company, unless they found some totally different and similarly-profitable business model they could transition to.
- hungryhobo 5y ago
  i mean i get the hate, but categorize moderating facebook as 'can't even moderate a website' is pretty outrageous
  - bostonsre 5y ago
    I meant to stress that their metaverse vision seems to be a much more massive endeavor and that it would probably be a good idea to learn to walk, or moderate their website (or whatever you want to call their tech that interfaces with their users through a website and app) before they try to run and create something that they most likely will also not be able to control effectively.
estebarb 5y ago
In Spanish people gets two days bans by asking for "tinta HP negra" (black HP ink. In Spanish, HP not only refers to HP Inc, but shortcut of 'son of a bitch'). But if you run a fake news page promoting a coup d'etat it is perfectly fine!
Ahmed90 5y ago
Can confirm Arabic FB moderation is next to 0 --- my comment from an older relevant post ---- I personally reported 3 posts on different FB pages 1st was a religion extremist guy who says to Iraqi people that they should protest and fight the "other side" of the religion (aka start a new civil war) instead of protesting against the corrupted government. 2nd was a post that was praising the guy who murdered the Danish (Or was he Norwegian?) teacher who mocked Islam, and calling him a hero. and the 3rd was a post that says "Women education is satanic, women's purpose is marriage". --- end old comment --- 4th report was a friend of mine, he reported a page that post's pictures of underage boys im boxers/underwear and write nasty shit in the post and comments, like an obvious pedo community. all of these 4 reports was "The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards" and then it explains how to block pages
- tasogare 5y ago
  > "The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards" They're not lying, nor they're not doing their job: Facebook is supporting islamist organizations so of course they won't suppress posts spreading that ideology. The same goes for Twitter, which is fine being a platform for Talibans, ISIS and other terrorist groups but which sensor Western politicians at the slightest (perfectly legal) tweet that displease them. Somehow for the wokists in charge, muslims are always oppressed even when firing first, and the white man being the enemy any allies is good for them.
amadeuspagel 5y ago
I can't quite express why, but this line "profit over people" creeps me out. Maybe it's this idea that there are just "people", a homogenous group that facebook can choose, or not, when really what facebook is blamed for is siding with one group of people over another - either censoring some people, or not censoring some people that other people think should be censored.
scotty79 5y ago
I think moderation is a bad idea. They should rather provide the tools for the useres to self-moderate their feeds so they can avoid engaging with content they don't want to engage.

114 points by donohoe 5y ago

> hate speech and disinformation targeting at-risk users such as women and the LGBTQ+ community are left rampant on the platform And Israelis too! Or is it Palestinians who are at-risk. Oh well, I'm sure the moderators will sort that one out

chespinoza 5y ago

I think the same happens for every other language but English, in the past I've reported several abusive attacks/ posts/comments in facebook (in Spanish) and later they've said that they don't see any issue, so clearly they just don't understand what you're reporting.

bongoman37 5y ago

This is true for all other languages. Hindi language content on Facebook is pretty much unmoderated with all that you can expect from it.

Jiro 5y ago

This is just another case of "police cracks down on Mafia" when it's one section of the Mafia turning in another disfavored section of the Mafia to the police. I've yet to see a recent complaint about inconsistent and discriminatory Facebook censorship say that Facebook should just stop censoring. It's always "Facebook isn't doing enough to censor against the right and in favor of black people and LGBTQ".

ben_w 5y ago
I see plenty of right wing politicians and commentators (and also, though not recently, my extremely left wing ex) complaining that it was censoring their political views unfairly. Very recently, I have even seen some call for an end to algorithmic timelines, though ironically I can’t find a link.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  Here's an article about the "Filter Bubble Transparency Act" which intends "that internet platforms give users the option to engage with a platform without being manipulated by algorithms driven by user-specific data": https://www.makeuseof.com/filter-bubble-transparency-act-explained/ https://www.makeuseof.com/filter-bubble-transparency-act-exp...
revolvingocelot 5y ago
>the right [...] black people and LGBTQ A clever elision of what each group mentioned is actually saying... Which one is most like the Mafia, I wonder?
- Jiro 5y ago
  When one Mafia family turns another one in, they're doing it to get back at the other family--they're not doing it because they think that crime is a bad thing. They're perfectly happy with crime, as long as they are the ones committing the crime. It's the exact same thing for censorship. The people who are complaining about Facebook censorship don't want to end censorship. It's just that they want to be the ones doing the censoring.
  - revolvingocelot 5y ago
    Comparing Facebook to the cops and ideologically aligned groups of users to Mafia families is a strange analogy. Not sure why you chose it, except maybe to imply things. One of the things that your analogy implies is that speech is criminal. Many, including the actual cops, believe certain kinds of speech indeed are. But who is saying what?
    - Jiro 5y ago
      No, the analogy is that censorship is criminal. We have one set of criminals (people complaining about Facebook) wanting to turn in another set of criminals (crackdown on Facebook censorship) so that they're the only criminals around (they want to be in control of the censorship). They don't actually want to stop crime (they don't actually want to stop censorship).
      - revolvingocelot 5y ago
        >No, the analogy is that censorship is criminal No, that's not right. Above, you likened cops to Facebook and groups of users to Mafia families who tattle on the crime of other families in order to stymie them. The Mafia does crime, while groups of users do speech; the cops catch and punish crime, while Facebook censors speech. The "only criminals around" won't be in control of the censorship unless you're suggesting that a group of users is going to unilaterally take over Facebook. ...Are you? Which one?
fennecfoxen 5y ago
If this is true in your experience, you ought broaden your horizons on the topic. If nothing else, there are certainly plenty of complaints about facially-reasonable-ish policies being implemented in an insane and incoherent manner — like when Facebook or Google take down "extremist content," but it's like video archives of extremists intended to be used to fight war crimes and bring their perpetrators to justice. e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/facebook-algorithms-are-making-it-harder/588931/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/facebook-a... (Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes / Algorithms that take down “terrorist” videos could hamstring efforts to bring human-rights abusers to justice.) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-socialmedia-rights-trfn/lost-memories-war-crimes-evidence-threatened-by-ai-moderation-idUSKBN23Q2TO https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-socialmedia-rights... ("'Lost memories': War crimes evidence threatened by AI moderation") https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21664951/facebook-ban-stolen-artifacts-aids-criminal-organizations https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21664951/facebook-ban-st... ("Facebook is deleting evidence of war crimes, researchers say / A ban on selling stolen artifacts is having unintended consequences)
- Jiro 5y ago
  Of course Facebook censorship is insane and incoherent. But pretty much no widely publicized complaint about these ever says "Facebook censorship is insane and incoherent, so Facebook should stop censoring". They just want to be the ones in control of the censorship instead.
  - dale_glass 5y ago
    If you don't moderate content, everything turns into 4chan. And for those two want that, 4chan already exists.
  - elashri 5y ago
    One example of allowing everything is the mass murder of New Zealand mosque that was live streamed on Facebook, do you say that something like that should be allowed and Facebook cannot censor any content?

baybal2 5y ago

I knew a Saudi student who went to a hunting trip in Canada, posted a video of them speaking Arabic with guns, and got permabanned on fb. It was in 2010. Social media companies were said to be making a lot of employment in North Africa just because they were obliged by EU to mow down "terrorist" content long before IS, and they need megatons of Arabic speakers just for that. It came to my mind, maybe underpaid Moroccans, and Tunisians just didn't like rich Saudi kids having good time?

petercooper 5y ago

Not as serious as the "Al-Aqsa" issue in the post, but if you post a picture of Momo, a sculpture by a Japanese artist, to your own timeline, you get a two day block. I think a lot of their moderation system might be a bundle of crude if-statements thrown up to put out temporary fires they're dealing with.

m10y 5y ago
The Momo thing was a pretty big deal -- Just calling it a random Japanese sculpture is ignoring everything that happened around it on various social media outlets. I can understand why Facebook would remove references to it pretty much forever. Its fame was never tied to anything but the controversy. Are there other examples of autobans that are more egregious? Just curious.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  https://www.insider.com/momo-challenge-hoax-japanese-sculpture-mother-bird-2019-3 https://www.insider.com/momo-challenge-hoax-japanese-sculptu... > The sculpture appears to be Aisawa's interpretation of the Japanese folklore character, Ubume, the representation of the ghost of a woman who died during childbirth ... parents started claiming the image was popping up in YouTube videos, instructing children to kill themselves and keep the clips secret from parents ... There were no screenshots or recordings of such appearances, but the hoax was spread by celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Kehlani.
  - ronsor 5y ago
    > hoax was spread by celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Kehlani > listening to celebrities That's your real problem right there.
    - pphysch 5y ago
      With the important caveat that most American politicians and intellectuals are essentially celebrities -- they are not focused on governance or discovery but rather on promoting and monetizing their personal image & power, because that's what our society incentivizes. Someone who blindly follows the Kardashians is not necessarily worse off epistemically than someone who blindly follows Biden/Trump/AOC/Boebert or the Experts on NPR/Fox/CBS/HN.

api 5y ago

If they do it through translation it'd be hilarious. When we get tech support queries in languages like Arabic we pass them through Google Translate and the result always makes me think of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grA5XmBRC6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grA5XmBRC6g

jklinger410 5y ago

Moderating is so hard it will probably the first application for AI with generalized intelligence.

rektide 5y ago
It feels like an impossible goal.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Moderation or AGI?
  - ascii232425 5y ago
    Why not both?
throwuxiytayq 5y ago
> Controlling humans will probably the first application for AI with generalized intelligence. Sounds good to me. Let's do it. Can we get Zuckerberg on the line?
Ajedi32 5y ago
Personally I think it feels kinda dystopian for an AI to be deciding what human beings are allowed to say; _especially_ if it's highly effective. There was a comment from another user I favorited a while back which reflects my thoughts on the topic of AI-driven moderation pretty well[1]: > I find censorship via algorithms extremely scary. There will be false positives and false negatives and there is absolutely zero recourse. Censorship by algorithms is a perfect expression of bureaucracy. In perfect bureaucracies, responsibilty is spread so thinly that it's impossible to determine who is responsible for a mistake. With algorithms, there's actually no human on the hook at all. Are you going to blame the programmers? > By all means, use machine learning to flag posts so humans can look at them. But automating the removal of content and the banning of human users is a road I strongly suspect we will regret going down. If the volume of content is sufficient so that you need to use algorithms to remove human-generated content then I'd say it's time to reconsider whether that content should be removed at all. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867975

josh_fyi 5y ago

Why does it say in an article about Arabic, "In Afghanistan, where hate speech is reportedly one of the top 'abuse categories.'..." Arabic is not spoke in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, there is common ignorant generalization that Arabic is the language of Iran, Afghanistan, and other Muslim countries. To those who live there, the distinction is not insignificant. This also casts doubt on the veracity of everything else in this article.

rich_sasha 5y ago
Some language nerdiness: Persian (Farsi), and main languages of Afghanistan (Pashto and Tajik) are all indo-european, so the same language family as Indian Subcontinent and (most) European languages. Arabic is from a whole different family tree of Semitic languages, which also includes Hebrew and Maltese (go figure). They are totally different to indo-european languages.
- GravitasFailure 5y ago
  >...family tree of Semitic languages, which also includes...Maltese Okay. I did NOT see that one coming. In retrospect they're not exactly far from other Arabic-speaking countries, but I'm curious what the history is. I've also heard that Sicilian retains some features that differentiates it from Italian and suggests different roots, so I wonder if there's a connection there with Maltese.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Malta was conquered by North African Islamic caliphate around ~800AD, and then 200 years later the Normans(yes, those normans weren't just invading England around the year 1000) came in and took it, and then 200 years after that they kicked the Muslims out. By that point the Arabic that the original invaders brought was the common language, and it developed independently from the Arabic spoken in North Africa, slowly becoming latinized by the Christian Normans.
    - GravitasFailure 5y ago

xutopia 5y ago

In French it's horrible as well. They have such a naive approach it is ridiculous. One word that keeps getting banned is "pédale" which means pedal but was also used as a slur till maybe the 90s in France. Some people getting banned because they want to sell their guitar pedal... pretty ridiculous.

l5870uoo9y 5y ago
Know the etymology behind "pédale"?
- malka 5y ago
  It comes from 'pédé' which is slur for 'pédéraste', which means a man who has sex with other men
  - aorth 5y ago
    Rather, a man who is engaged in an erotic relationship with an adolescent boy.
    - Dma54rhs 5y ago
      At least in Eastern Europe the word was used as a synonym for both during the communism, or well at the time there was no difference between the two (piderast/pederast etc)
gigglesupstairs 5y ago
In Hindi, they don’t care. Most of Facebook’s focus is US where it is based and held liable more often.
himinlomax 5y ago
You get a two day block for saying "ritale". I also got a two a two day block for using the word "japs" in the context of talking about atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Rape of Nanking. Wouldn't want to be offending long dead mass murderers, would we.

Ajedi32 5y ago

I'm starting to think centralized moderation is just a bad idea in general for sites of Facebook's size and reach. It doesn't scale well, can't easily adapt to other cultures, and has all sorts of problems with neutrality and subjectivity that are inherent to the very idea of centralized control. Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with crowdsourced moderation via downvotes and flags, community-appointed moderators and the like, though it's true those systems come with their own set problems. A truly decentralized system where each user chooses their own moderation system could be even better in my opinion, at least in theory, but we're some ways off from that being viable from a practical perspective.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ehutch79 5y ago
It helps, but you still have to deal with groups that are intentionally toxic or problematic.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  Moderating the moderators seems like a much more tractable problem than moderating all the messages. In Reddit's case, that means shutting down subreddits that trigger too many complaints from people outside those subreddits (in particular, from news articles and advertisers).
- _bfhp 5y ago
  At what point did we retire the option of convincing people to stop being hateful? I didn't get the memo. It seems we want to ban whatever groups are considered "hateful" (but not the oppressed expressing their anger at the oppressor! Such an easy distinction to make) eventually leading to what, legal bans on speech?
dannyr 5y ago
So imagine what will happen when Facebook launches its metaverse!

annadane 5y ago

The moderation would be one thing if there could be an argument that the platform generally acts in good faith, but they don't. They seem to both have the Google problem that you absolutely can not reach anyone if you get banned by accident (and bye bye to your social graph if that happens, which is made all the worse because they insist on integrating all their services into one like IG/WA) and they also don't ban things that are reported and which ought to be banned

bostonsre 5y ago

Can you imagine what a dystopian sci-fi hell hole the metaverse could be with facebook at the helm? They can't even moderate a website.. the hubris is pretty amazing.

handrous 5y ago
Their business model depends on operating in a way that's nearly impossible to effectively moderate, and abusive (see all the stories about what Facebook moderators have to see) to try. The only way to fix the problem is to... not operate the business that way, since it's fundamentally a bad idea, considered from that perspective. Which would effectively mean the death of the company, unless they found some totally different and similarly-profitable business model they could transition to.
hungryhobo 5y ago
i mean i get the hate, but categorize moderating facebook as 'can't even moderate a website' is pretty outrageous
- bostonsre 5y ago
  I meant to stress that their metaverse vision seems to be a much more massive endeavor and that it would probably be a good idea to learn to walk, or moderate their website (or whatever you want to call their tech that interfaces with their users through a website and app) before they try to run and create something that they most likely will also not be able to control effectively.

estebarb 5y ago

In Spanish people gets two days bans by asking for "tinta HP negra" (black HP ink. In Spanish, HP not only refers to HP Inc, but shortcut of 'son of a bitch'). But if you run a fake news page promoting a coup d'etat it is perfectly fine!

Ahmed90 5y ago

Can confirm Arabic FB moderation is next to 0 --- my comment from an older relevant post ---- I personally reported 3 posts on different FB pages 1st was a religion extremist guy who says to Iraqi people that they should protest and fight the "other side" of the religion (aka start a new civil war) instead of protesting against the corrupted government. 2nd was a post that was praising the guy who murdered the Danish (Or was he Norwegian?) teacher who mocked Islam, and calling him a hero. and the 3rd was a post that says "Women education is satanic, women's purpose is marriage". --- end old comment --- 4th report was a friend of mine, he reported a page that post's pictures of underage boys im boxers/underwear and write nasty shit in the post and comments, like an obvious pedo community. all of these 4 reports was "The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards" and then it explains how to block pages

tasogare 5y ago
> "The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards" They're not lying, nor they're not doing their job: Facebook is supporting islamist organizations so of course they won't suppress posts spreading that ideology. The same goes for Twitter, which is fine being a platform for Talibans, ISIS and other terrorist groups but which sensor Western politicians at the slightest (perfectly legal) tweet that displease them. Somehow for the wokists in charge, muslims are always oppressed even when firing first, and the white man being the enemy any allies is good for them.

amadeuspagel 5y ago

I can't quite express why, but this line "profit over people" creeps me out. Maybe it's this idea that there are just "people", a homogenous group that facebook can choose, or not, when really what facebook is blamed for is siding with one group of people over another - either censoring some people, or not censoring some people that other people think should be censored.

scotty79 5y ago

I think moderation is a bad idea. They should rather provide the tools for the useres to self-moderate their feeds so they can avoid engaging with content they don't want to engage.