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Illustrative photo shows a smartphone screen displaying the Facebook logo on a Facebook website background, in Arlington, Virginia. (AFP photo)
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MELBOURNE: We and our team are the first Australian social science researchers to receive funding through Facebookcontent policy research awards, which we used to investigate hate speech on LGBTQI + community pages in five Asian countries: India, Myanmar, Indonesia, Philippines and Australia.
We looked at three aspects of the regulation of hate speech in the Asia-Pacific region over an 18-month period. First, we mapped hate speech law in our case study countries, in order to understand how this problem could be legally countered. We also examined whether Facebook’s definition of “hate speech” includes all recognized forms and contexts for this disturbing behavior.
Additionally, we mapped Facebook’s content regulation teams, discussing with staff how company policies and procedures were working to identify emerging forms of hate.
Even though Facebook funded our study, it said for privacy reasons it couldn’t give us access to a hate speech dataset it is removing. We have therefore not been able to test how effectively its internal moderators classify hate.
Instead, we captured posts and comments from each country’s top three LGBTQI + public Facebook pages, to find hate speech that was missed by the platform’s AI filters or moderators. humans.
We asked the admins of these pages about their experiences with moderating hate and what they thought Facebook could do to help them reduce abuse.
They told us that Facebook would often dismiss their hate speech reports, even when the post clearly violated its community standards. In some cases, messages that were originally deleted would be displayed again on call.
Most page administrators said the so-called “flagging” process rarely worked and found it to be crippling. They wanted Facebook to consult them more to get a better idea of the types of abuse they see displayed and why it constitutes hate speech in their cultural context.
Facebook has long had a problem with the scale and reach of hate speech on its platform in Asia. For example, while he banned some Hindu extremists, he left his pages online.
However, during our study, we were pleased to see that Facebook broadened its definition of hate speech, which now encompasses a wider range of hate behavior. It also explicitly recognizes that what happens online can trigger violence offline.
It should be noted that in the countries we have focused on, “hate speech” is rarely specifically prohibited by law. We found that other regulations such as cybersecurity laws or religious tolerance could be used to tackle hate speech, but instead tended to be used to suppress political dissent.
We concluded that Facebook’s problem is not with defining hate, but with being unable to identify certain types of hate, such as that posted in minority languages and regional dialects. It often does not respond appropriately to user reports of hateful content.
Media reports have shown that Facebook struggles to automatically identify hate posted in minority languages. It has not provided training materials for its own moderators in local languages, although many are from Asia-Pacific countries where English is not the first language.
In the Philippines and Indonesia in particular, we have found that LGBTIQ + groups are exposed to an unacceptable level of discrimination and intimidation. This includes death threats, targeting Muslims, and threats of stoning or beheading.
On Indian pages, Facebook filters failed to capture the vomiting emojis posted in response to gay wedding photos and dismissed some very clear defamation reports.
In Australia, by contrast, we found no unmoderated hate speech – just other types of insensitive and inappropriate comments. This could indicate that less abuse is posted, or that there is more effective English moderation on the part of Facebook or the page admins.
Likewise, in Myanmar, LGBTIQ + groups experienced very little hate speech. But we are aware that Facebook is working hard to reduce hate speech on its platform there, following its use to persecute the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Also, gender diversity is likely not as volatile a topic in Myanmar as it is in India, Indonesia and the Philippines. In these countries, LGBTIQ + rights are highly politicized.
Facebook has taken important steps to combat hate speech. However, we are concerned that Covid-19 has forced the platform to become more dependent on machine moderation. This, too, at a time when it can only automatically identify hate in around 50 languages - even though thousands are spoken in the region every day.
Our report to Facebook presents several key recommendations to help improve its approach to tackling hate on its platform. Overall, we urged the company to meet more regularly with persecuted groups in the region, so that they can learn more about hate in their local contexts and languages.
This must happen alongside an increase in the number of its national policy specialists and internal moderators with expertise in minority languages.
Like the efforts in Europe, Facebook must also develop and publicize the channel of its trusted partner. This provides visible and official hate speech reporting partner organizations through which people can directly report hate activity to Facebook during crises such as the Christchurch Mosque attacks.
More broadly, we would like to see governments and NGOs cooperate to set up an Asian regional hate speech monitoring trial, similar to the one organized by the European Union.
Following the EU For example, such an initiative could help identify pressing trends in hate speech in the region, strengthen Facebook’s local reporting partnerships, and reduce the overall incidence of hate content on Facebook.
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