Facebook Files: moderation flaws in dozens of languages ​​outside the United States – archyworldys

Posted today at 1:00 p.m., updated at 1:14 p.m.

How can an Afghan user report hateful content on Facebook for removal? The task is not easy, because the interface is very poorly translated into Pashto and Dari, two important languages ​​among the thirty spoken in the country, regrets an employee of the social network. “In a country like Afghanistan, where the proportion of the population who understand English is extremely small, ensuring that the system is flawless in translation, at a minimum, seems of crucial importance.”, he writes, especially since Facebook is “The first social network in the country”.

This excerpt is taken from a January 2021 note on Afghanistan. This is one of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents, recovered by Frances Haugen, a former employee who left Facebook in May 2021, and transmitted by a US parliamentary source to several media, including The world. These files are often presentations, reports and studies carried out by members of the Facebook “integrity” team, responsible for ensuring the security of the platform.

These documents offer a rare insight into the machine of the world’s leading social network, with 2.9 billion users, 90% of which are outside the United States. These files reveal certain flaws of the American giant, one of the main ones relating to its international activities: in dozens of languages ​​and countries sometimes at risk or in the throes of conflict, the systems of protection and moderation, both human and automatic, are not sufficient.

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“Today, Facebook does not treat the United States and the rest of the world on an equal footing, denounces Frances Haugen. The company is hypocritical because it does not invest in adequate protection mechanisms for all users who do not speak English. “ “The most fragile countries have the least secure version of Facebook”, adds the whistleblower.

Coincidentally, this observation was extended by the brand new Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Ressa. “Facebook prioritizes the dissemination of lies mixed with anger and hatred rather than that of the facts”, estimated the Filipino journalist on October 9. These statements are in addition to a first series of articles from Wall Street Journal on the faults of Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram, which plunged the company into its worst political crisis since 2018, when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, campaign provider for Donald Trump, had been able to access millions of profiles.

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