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. “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. 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. Kenya is readying for a national election in August. This includes moderators in Kenya, Myanmar and other regions where material posted on the company’s platforms has been linked to real-world violence. Meta has consistently refused to say how many content moderators it has in countries where English is not the primary language. 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. 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. In Myanmar, one of the ads used a slur to refer to people of east Indian or Muslim origin and call for their killing. That’s why we have teams closely monitoring the situation and addressing these errors as quickly as possible.”Įach 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. “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. 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. “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. Meta also confirmed Thursday it sent a response.

On Thursday, however, Global Witness said it did receive a response earlier in July but it was lost in a spam folder. Global Witness said it reached out to Meta after its ads were accepted for publication but did not receive a response. 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. 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.Īmazon to buy vacuum maker iRobot for roughly $1.7B The Swahili language ads easily made it through Facebook’s detection systems and were approved for publication.Īs for the English ads, some were rejected at first, but only because they contained profanities and mistakes in addition to hate speech.

Some also included profanity and grammatical errors. They compared people to donkeys and goats. The ads, which the groups submitted both in English and in Swahili, spoke of beheadings, rape and bloodshed.

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. Facebook is letting violent hate speech slip through its controls in Kenya as it has in other countries, according to a new report from the nonprofit groups Global Witness and Foxglove.

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