(Ecofin Agency) – Recalling the role played in the ethnic violence in Burma by Facebook, many organizations had asked the Meta subsidiary to take more appropriate measures. The risk of a situation similar to Burma had been mentioned for Ethiopia.
Contrary to what had been announced, Facebook did not find a solution to avoid igniting the crisis in Ethiopia. The NGOs Global Witness and Foxglove have succeeded, in order to test the famous measures against hate speech, to publish 4 advertisements conveying demeaning remarks against each of the Ethiopian ethnic groups: the Oromo, the Amharas and the Tigrayans. “Facebook systems approved all ads,” report the two organizations.
The social network had however been warned by the supervisory board of Meta, its parent company on the role that the moderation of hateful content can play in the escalation of the situation in the country.
The organizations informed Meta. The group said the ads should not have been approved and highlighted the work it has done to detect hateful content on its platforms. A week after that response, Global Witness submitted two more ads for Meta’s approval, again with blatant hate speech. The two posts, written in Amharic, the most spoken language in Ethiopia, were approved.
“We have invested heavily in security measures in Ethiopia, increasing the number of employees with local expertise and strengthening our ability to detect hateful and inflammatory content in the most widely spoken languages, including Amharic”answered Meta again informed.
“We picked the worst cases we could think of. Those should be the easiest for Facebook to detect. It was not about coded language”lamented Rosie Sharpe, campaigner at Global Witness.
So far, Meta has declined to disclose the number of people hired to moderate content in non-English speaking territories. In the meantime, despite all the measures announced, Facebook is unable to offer a real response to hate speech.
Servan Ahougnon
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