It is the third such test of Facebook's ability to detect
hateful language — either via artificial intelligence or human moderators —
that the groups have run, and that the company has failed.
The ads, which the groups submitted both in English and in Swahili,
spoke of beheadings, rape and bloodshed. They compared people to donkeys and
goats. Some also included profanity and grammatical errors. The Swahili
language ads easily made it through Facebook's detection systems and were
approved for publication.
As for the English ads, some were rejected at first, but
only because they contained profanities and mistakes in addition to hate
speech. Once the profanities were removed and grammar errors fixed, however,
the ads — still calling for killings and containing obvious hate speech — went
through without a hitch.
“We were surprised to see that our ads had for the first
time been flagged, but they hadn't been flagged for the much more important
reasons that we expected them to be," said Nienke Palstra, senior campaigner
at London-based Global Witness.
The ads were never posted to Facebook. But the fact that
they easily could have been shows that despite repeated assurances that it
would do better, Facebook parent Meta still appears to regularly fail to detect
hate speech and calls for violence on its platform.
Global Witness said it reached out to Meta after its ads
were accepted for publication but did not receive a response. On Thursday,
however, Global Witness said it did receive a response earlier in July but it
was lost in a spam folder. Meta also confirmed Thursday it sent a response.
“We've taken extensive steps to help us catch hate speech
and inflammatory content in Kenya, and we're intensifying these efforts ahead
of the election. We have dedicated teams of Swahili speakers and proactive
detection technology to help us remove harmful content quickly and at scale,”
Meta said in a statement. "Despite these efforts, we know that there will
be examples of things we miss or we take down in error, as both machines and
people make mistakes. That's why we have teams closely monitoring the situation
and addressing these errors as quickly as possible.”
Each time Global Witness has submitted ads with blatant hate
speech to see if Facebook's systems would catch it, the company failed to do
so. In Myanmar, one of the ads used a slur to refer to people of east Indian or
Muslim origin and call for their killing. In Ethiopia, the ads used
dehumanizing hate speech to call for the murder of people belonging to each of
Ethiopia's three main ethnic groups — the Amhara, the Oromo and the Tigrayans.
Why ads and not regular posts? That's because Meta claims to
hold advertisements to an “even stricter” standard than regular, unpaid posts,
according to its help center page for paid advertisements.
Meta has consistently refused to say how many content
moderators it has in countries where English is not the primary language. This
includes moderators in Kenya, Myanmar and other regions where material posted
on the company's platforms has been linked to real-world violence.
Kenya is readying for a national election in August. On July
20, Meta posted a detailed blog post on how it is preparing for the country's
election, including establishing an “operations center” and removing harmful
content.
“In the six months leading up to April 30, 2022, we took
action on more than 37,000 pieces of content for violating our Hate Speech
policies on Facebook and Instagram in Kenya. During that same period, we also
took action on more than 42,000 pieces of content that violated our Violence
& Incitement policies," wrote Mercy Ndegwa, director of public policy
in East & Horn of Africa.
Global Witness said it resubmitted two of its ads, one in
English and one in Swahili, after Meta published its blog post to see if
anything has changed. Once again, the ads went through.
“If you're not catching these 20 ads, this 37,000 number
that you are celebrating, that is probably the tip of the iceberg. You have to
think that there's a lot that's (slipping through) your filter," Palstra
said.
The Global Witness report follows a separate study from June
that found that Facebook has failed to catch Islamic State group and al-Shabab
extremist content in posts aimed at East Africa. The region remains under
threat from violent attacks as Kenya prepares to vote.
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