Facebook's Arabic and Spanish moderation failures & punitive misinformation laws in Africa
We hope your week is going well. In this issue we have more updates from the Facebook Papers, which have shown that content in Arabic - the third most common language used on the platform - is poorly moderated, with harmful content staying online, and activists who use it to document human rights abuses and war crimes being detained instead on allegations of terrorism.
We also highlight Facebook's failure to respond to misinformation in Spanish, the ongoing suppression of freedom of expression that the government of the Philippines continues to impose on its people, and how punitive laws in Africa meant to contain misinformation are suppressing public discourse instead.
That's it for your weekly roundup of misinformation news, updates and threats. Please share your feedback and invite your friends to sign up here.
The latest top stories
Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster (Rest of World)
Despite Arabic being the third most common language on Facebook, the platform’s questionable approach to content moderation has led to the suppression of political speech due to over-enforcement of policies related to terrorism and incitement to violence. Facebook’s algorithms have incorrectly deleted Arabic content 77% of the time, even as hate speech and disinformation targeting at-risk users such as women and the LGBTQ+ community remain.
Arab activists and journalists, many of whom use Facebook to document human rights abuses and war crimes, are routinely censored and booted off the platform — most commonly under the pretext of terrorism. This is especially pronounced in times of political crisis and violence — Marwa Fatafta, MENA Policy Manager at AccessNow
What Facebook knew about its Latino-aimed disinformation problem (Los Angeles Times)
The Facebook Papers document corroborated what Latin American researchers and the activist Latinx community in US have been saying for years: misinformation content is much worse in Spanish.
“The same sort of themes that were showing up in English were also showing up in Spanish, but in English, they were either getting flagged or taken down altogether, and in Spanish they were being left up; or if they were getting taken down, it was taking days and days to take them down. We were consistently met much the same way they meet other groups that are working on disinformation or hate speech, with a bunch of empty promises and a lack of detail” — Jessica González, co-chief executive of media advocacy group Free Press
Maria Ressa warns of authoritarians, social media, disinformation (The Harvard Gazette)
"What happens when an authoritarian leader waging a campaign of extrajudicial killings and disappearances in his antidrug war uses the internet to spread misinformation and set public opinion against all critics of his methods, including journalists? You get what’s been happening in the Philippines over the past five years, as President Rodrigo Duterte’s government has turned social media into an effective tool of information warfare designed to intimidate and silence all opposition and distort and manipulate the public’s understanding of reality", warned investigative journalist Maria Ressa during the annual Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press.
“When you want to rip the heart out of a democracy, you go after the facts. That’s what modern authoritarians do. This is the world we live in" — Maria Ressa, investigative journalist and winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize
The African misinformation crisis is being exacerbated by punitive laws. It's time to rethink (Bad Politicians)
With concern rising among African politicians and the public around misinformation and its impacts, a flurry of laws and regulations have been passed since 2016 penalising the publication or broadcast of what is deemed to be “false information”. However, these laws have largely been found to have a chilling effect on political and media debate, and do not reduce misinformation harm despite their stated purpose, often ending up curtailing public debate instead.
"In our study we examined the changes made to laws and regulations relating to the publication of “false information” in 11 sub-Saharan countries between 2016 and 2020, how they correlate with misinformation, and the role they may play in reducing harm caused by misinformation. We found that these laws do not reduce misinformation harm. This matters as the laws curtail public debate, yet fail to curb the harmful effects of misinformation" — Peter Cunliffe-Jones, Co-Director Chevening African Media Freedom Fellowship
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