Facebook failed rest of the world

FACEBOOK was well aware that hate speech was spreading on its site in India which could exacerbate ethnic violence, and did not deploy resources to curb the phenomenon, US media have reported, citing internal documents.

The so-called Facebook Papers, leaked by whistle-blower Frances Haugen, have already revealed the impact of Facebook – as well as of Whatsapp and Instagram, both of which it owns – on the deep polarisation of politics in the US and on the mental health of some teenagers.

But there have long been concerns over the social network’s impact in spreading hate speech fuelling violence in the developing world, such as the massacre targeting the Rohingya minority in Myanmar.

The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post focused on Facebook’s presence in India, the biggest market for the Us-based company and its messaging service Whatsapp in terms of users.

A report by the company’s own researchers from July 2020 showed that the share of inflammatory content rocketed starting in December 2019.

“Rumours and calls to violence spread particularly on Facebook’s Whatsapp messaging service in late February 2020,” when clashes between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority left dozens dead, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Facebook had also as early as February 2019 created a fictitious account, that of a 21-year-old woman in northern India, to better understand the user experience, the Washington Post reported, citing an internal memo.

The account followed posts, videos and accounts recommended by Facebook, but a company researcher found it promoted a torrent of fake and inflammatory content.

“I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life,” media quoted the staffer as saying in a 46-page report among the documents

released by Haugen.

“Soon, without any direction from the user, the Facebook account was flooded with pro-modi propaganda and anti-muslim hate speech,” the Washington Post reported. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, was campaigning for re-election at the time.

The test also coincided with India launching an air strike on Pakistan over a militant suicide bombing in the disputed Kashmir region.

The unnamed researcher called that experience an “integrity nightmare”.

The content made jingoistic claims about India’s air strikes and included graphic pictures.

These included one image of a man holding a severed head and using language slamming Pakistanis and Muslims as “dogs” and “pigs”, reports said.

“Facebook has meticulously studied

its approach abroad – and was well aware that weaker moderation in non-english-speaking countries leaves the platform vulnerable to abuse by bad actors and authoritarian regimes,” the Washington Post continued, citing the internal documents.

The documents showed that the vast majority of the company’s budget dedicated to the fight against misinformation is intended for the US – even though users there represent less than 10% of Facebook’s users worldwide.

“We’ve invested significantly in technology to find hate speech in various languages, including Hindi and Bengali,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “As a result, we’ve reduced the amount of hate speech that people see by half this year. Today, it’s down to 0.05%.” The figure is a percentage of content in all countries.

The company said it was “expanding”

its operations into new languages. It has “hate speech classifiers” working in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Urdu.

More than 40 civil rights groups warned last year that Facebook had failed to address dangerous content in India.

One Facebook India executive resigned in 2020 after being accused of refusing to apply hate speech policies to the Hindu nationalist ruling party and also sharing an anti-muslim post.

“Hate speech against marginalised groups, including Muslims, is on the rise globally. So we are improving enforcement,” the spokesperson said.

Facebook’s mission statement is to “bring the world closer together”, and for years, voracious expansion into markets beyond the US has fuelled its growth and profits.

Social networks that let citizens connect and organise became a route around governments that had controlled and censored centralised systems like TV and radio. Facebook was celebrated for its role in helping activists organise protests against authoritarian governments in the Middle East during the Arab Spring.

For millions of people in Asia, Africa and South America, Facebook became the primary way they experience the Internet. Facebook partnered with local telecom operators in countries such as Myanmar, Ghana and Mexico to give free access to its app, along with a bundle of other basic services like job listings and weather reports. The program, called “Free Basics”, helped millions get online for the first time, cementing Facebook’s role as a communication platform all around the world and locking millions of users into a version of the Internet controlled by an individual company.

In June 2020, a Facebook employee posted an audit of the company’s attempts to make its platform safer for users in “at-risk countries”, a designation given to nations Facebook marks as especially vulnerable to misinformation and hate speech.

The audit showed Facebook had massive gaps in coverage. In countries including Myanmar, Pakistan and Ethiopia, Facebook didn’t have algorithms that could parse the local language and identify posts about Covid-19.

In India and Indonesia, it couldn’t identify links to misinformation, the audit showed.

In Ethiopia, the audit came a month after its government postponed federal elections, a major step in a build-up to a civil war that broke out months later. In addition to being unable to detect misinformation, the audit found Facebook also didn’t have algorithms to flag hate speech in the country’s two biggest local languages.

Meanwhile, Facebook vice-president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, has issued a company-wide memo warning employees to brace “for more bad headlines in the coming days”.