{"id":1177,"date":"2021-11-23T02:02:56","date_gmt":"2021-11-23T01:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/2021\/11\/23\/facebook-fails-to-curb-the-spread-of-hate-speech-in-ethiopia-mail-and-guardian\/"},"modified":"2021-11-23T02:02:56","modified_gmt":"2021-11-23T01:02:56","slug":"facebook-fails-to-curb-the-spread-of-hate-speech-in-ethiopia-mail-and-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/2021\/11\/23\/facebook-fails-to-curb-the-spread-of-hate-speech-in-ethiopia-mail-and-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook fails to curb the spread of hate speech in Ethiopia &#8211; Mail and Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"cfbc967f0983488262956e73eca9483a\" data-index=\"1\" style=\"float: none; margin:10px 0 10px 0; text-align:center;\">\n<script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-3859091246952232\" crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- blok -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\" data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-3859091246952232\" data-ad-slot=\"1334354390\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\r\n\n<\/div>\n<p>\u00a0<a href=\"\/subscribe\"><strong>Subscribe <\/strong><\/a>or <a href=\"https:\/\/mg.co.za\/login\/?redirect_to=https:\/\/mg.co.za\"><strong>Login<\/strong><\/a><br \/>\u00a0<a href=\"\/subscribe\"><strong>Subscribe <\/strong><\/a>or <a href=\"https:\/\/mg.co.za\/login\/?redirect_to=https:\/\/mg.co.za\"><strong>Login<\/strong><\/a><br \/>On 30 August, nine months into <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/news\/2021\/11\/4\/a-year-on-ethiopia-decimated-by-civil-war\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ethiopia\u2019s civil war<\/a>, a Facebook user who goes by the name Northern Patriot Tewodros Kebede Ayo posted a clear incitement to violence on his page.<br \/>He accused the Qimant, an ethnic minority in Ethiopia\u2019s Amhara region, of supporting the opposition forces. He called them \u201csnitches\u201d, and singled out the Qimant residents of Aykel, a small town in Amhara.<br \/>Writing in Amharic, he said: \u201cThe punishment has been imposed &#8230; the clean-up continues.\u201d<br \/>Two days later, between 1 and 2 September, more than a dozen Qimant in Aykel were dragged from their homes and butchered on the street, allegedly by members of the Fano militia, an Amhara nationalist paramilitary group that has been implicated in multiple atrocities. This was reported at the time by <em>Al Jazeera<\/em>, and two sources have independently confirmed this account.<br \/>On 1 September, users on another Facebook account \u2014 a page called The Fano Patriotic People\u2019s Radical System Change \u2014 wrote: \u201cNo mercy for the Qimant,\u201d one post said, even as the killings in Aykel were happening. Another user on the page had, in May 2020, laid out a 14-page road map on how to organise the Fano militia, with both violent and non-violent options.<br \/>There is no evidence that there is a direct causal link between these Facebook posts and the massacre in Aykel. What we do know is that Facebook employees already knew about both of these accounts, and were worried about their potential to incite violence.<br \/>Months earlier, in a leaked internal document, a team at Facebook had found that these accounts were key nodes in an online disinformation network aligned to the Fano militia, codenamed Disarming Lucy.<br \/>According to Facebook\u2019s data, this network was coordinating \u201ccalls for violence and other armed conflict in Ethiopia\u201d; and \u201cpromoting armed conflict, coordinated doxxing, recruiting and fund-raising for the militia\u201d.<br \/>The Facebook team that had discovered Disarming Lucy recommended that all the accounts associated with it be taken down. This was in March 2021. But as of today, every single one of those accounts is still active \u2014 and many are still spreading hate speech and inciting violence.<br \/>Facebook did not respond to requests for comment prior to publication.<br \/>Between Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, more than 3.6 billion people regularly use one of Facebook\u2019s apps (the company has recently rebranded and is now known as Meta). Ironically, for a company that is built on the sharing of personal information, Facebook\u2019s inner workings are relatively opaque.<br \/>Until now.<br \/>In May 2021, a data scientist named <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2021\/oct\/24\/frances-haugen-i-never-wanted-to-be-a-whistleblower-but-lives-were-in-danger\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Frances Haugen<\/a> resigned from her job with Facebook\u2019s civic integrity unit. That unit, based in Facebook\u2019s San Francisco headquarters, was supposed to monitor \u2014 and, crucially, mitigate \u2014 all the ways in which Facebook causes harm, including the spread of hate speech and disinformation. It was disbanded in the wake of the United States\u2019 election last year.<br \/>Haugen had grown increasingly disillusioned with Facebook, coming to believe that it was putting profit ahead of providing users with meaningful protection.<br \/>Before she left the company for good, Haugen took more than 10\u2009000 documents with her. She copied them by taking photos of her computer screen \u2014 in some of the documents, her silhouette is even visible in the reflection.<br \/>She shared these documents first with the US Congress, and then with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-says-she-wants-to-fix-the-company-not-harm-it-11633304122\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>The Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a>.<br \/>Now she\u2019s shared them with a consortium of journalists from around the world, including <em>The Continent<\/em>.<br \/>The documents are drawn largely from the civic integrity unit and Facebook\u2019s internal workplace forum.<br \/>They paint a damning picture of a company that understands how dangerous its platform can be but which has repeatedly failed to take actions to make it safer, especially outside of the US.<br \/>Haugen describes herself as \u201can algorithm person\u201d. She is an expert in the intricacies of Facebook\u2019s back-end, rather than the political complexities of individual countries, which gives her an insider\u2019s perspective on how hate speech spreads on the platform.<br \/>The key point, confirmed in a number of internal experiments, is that content that is inflammatory and extreme is more likely to go viral, generating what Facebook calls meaningful social interaction (MSI), a metric that measures the reach and effect on Facebook (and which is central to how Facebook makes money).<br \/>Most of Facebook\u2019s features are designed to maximise meaningful social interaction, which means that the algorithm has a tendency to promote extreme content. Or, in Facebook-speak, according to one leaked internal memo: \u201cAnalyses consistently document that harmful content and low quality producers disproportionately garner distribution from unconnected reach compared to benign content and high quality producers.\u201d&nbsp;<br \/>And, from another leaked document: \u201cIt\u2019s no secret Facebook\u2019s growth-first approach to product development leads us to ship risky features.\u201d In other words: it appears that the prevalence of hate speech and disinformation on Facebook is not a bug. It\u2019s a feature.<br \/>There are, broadly, two ways in which Facebook can tackle this problem. The first is by tweaking the way Facebook works, to make it harder for people to share problematic content. These changes can be subtle, but have an enormous effect nonetheless.<br \/>One change favoured by Haugen is to make it more difficult for Facebook users to reshare content from people who are not in their friends list.<br \/>Currently it\u2019s as easy as pressing the share button, which requires little effort or thought. Internal experiments have shown that disabling the share button in these contexts leads to an instant reduction in the spread of fake news and hate speech. Users are still free to reshare the content, but they have to copy and paste it to do so and even this minimum level of effort makes most people think twice.<br \/>Technical solutions such as this work across different countries and languages.&nbsp;<br \/>It\u2019s a quick, comprehensive fix.&nbsp;<br \/>The only problem, as far as Facebook is concerned, is that it also has a strongly negative effect on meaningful social interaction \u2014 people share things less and they \u201clike\u201d things less.<br \/>&nbsp;In a briefing with the civic integrity team, the notes of which are among the leaked documents, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg makes his position clear, directing the team not to go ahead with any changes \u201cif there was a material trade-off with MSI impact\u201d.<br \/>This left the civic integrity team with an impossible task, according to another document: \u201c&#8230; integrity teams spend months searching for win\/wins \u2014 pro-safety features that are also pro-growth. But there\u2019s the thing \u2014 these solutions-without-downside almost never exist\u201d.<br \/>Or, as Haugen put it in a briefing with journalists recently: \u201cFacebook knows how to make these harms better. But they also know that no one can catch them. So they keep falling on the side of profits.\u201d<br \/>The second option available to Facebook is to tackle hate speech and disinformation on a case-by-case basis, using a combination of human moderators and machine learning to analyse individual posts.&nbsp;<br \/>This approach requires enormous financial and human resources, which Facebook appears to be reluctant to commit outside of the US.<br \/>For Ethiopia, for example, two sources said there are fewer than 100 people working on content moderation across the four Ethiopian languages that are supported by Facebook \u2014 Amharic, Oromo, Somali and Tigrinya. With some 6.4\u2009-million Ethiopians on Facebook, this works out to less than one moderator for 64\u2009000 people.<br \/>To compound the problem, the majority of Facebook\u2019s spending is directed towards the US. According to financial records, in 2020 just 13% of the company\u2019s budget to combat misinformation went to countries outside of the US \u2014 even though these countries account for 90% of Facebook\u2019s user base.<br \/>Nor is machine learning an effective solution. Not at the moment, anyway. Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist who studies algorithmic bias, said that major errors can happen when computers are responsible for translating and assessing content for languages they do not prioritise.<br \/>\u201cYou have to have people who are following, investigating and understanding the context very clearly, like journalists. However, the social media platforms working on this don\u2019t seem to have that.\u201d<br \/>\u201cFacebook needs to do better as far as content moderation on the continent goes,\u201d said Eric Mugendi, Africa programme manager at Meedan, a tech non-profit that aims to improve the quality of online discourse.&nbsp;<br \/>\u201cAdditionally, the platform needs to allocate more resources to local languages that are spoken widely in the continent and used on the platform, but are not properly monitored for potential harm. They need to acknowledge the real world harm that their inaction has led to, and much more needs to be done.\u201d<br \/>In Ethiopia, a country engulfed in a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2021\/nov\/05\/ethiopia-tigray-war-who-is-fighting-and-what-has-been-the-toll\">civil war<\/a> that has been characterised by multiple accounts of massacres and atrocities, that real-world harm is all too visible.<br \/>Earlier this month, Facebook deleted a post by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed that called on citizens to \u201cbury the terrorist TPLF [the Tigray People\u2019s Liberation Front]\u201d. The post violated its community standards against inciting violence, the company said.<br \/>(If anyone understands the power of Facebook, it is Abiy. He was swept into power on the back of the grassroots, youth-led Qeerroo movement, which was itself enabled and then supercharged through Facebook.)<br \/>But even more explicit posts by other prominent figures have remained online. Berhan Taye, a digital rights researcher and activist, personally reported one post by media personality Mesay Mekonnen, which called for all Tigrayans to be placed in concentration camps.&nbsp;<br \/>Multiple media reports confirm that Tigrayans in Addis Ababa are being rounded up and held in detention facilities in the capital.&nbsp;<br \/>Taye was told by Facebook that the post was reviewed, but \u201cdoesn\u2019t go against one of our specific community standards\u201d.&nbsp;<br \/>Only after she escalated her complaint, using her own connections within Facebook, was the post removed.<br \/>The problems Ethiopia is experiencing are mirrored elsewhere in the developing world, Taye said. \u201c[Facebook claims] less than 10% of Ethiopians use Facebook, implying investing in a place like that doesn\u2019t make sense.&nbsp;<br \/>\u201cBut when you look at markets like India, Philippines or Brazil where Facebook has over 500\u2009million users, Facebook has equally failed. Either they don\u2019t care, or don\u2019t know the impact the platforms have and are figuring out things after they have transpired.\u201d<br \/>Rosemary Ajayi, of the Digital Africa Research Lab, said: \u201cPeople across Africa should be concerned about Facebook\u2019s poor handling of the Ethiopian crisis because it is indicative of the quality of the response we are likely to see in other African countries.\u201d&nbsp;<br \/>Facebook \u2014 or rather Meta \u2014 insists it is taking its responsibilities in Ethiopia seriously. In a statement on Tuesday, the company said that \u201cfor more than two years, we\u2019ve been implementing a comprehensive strategy to keep people safe on our platform given the severe, long-standing risks of conflict\u201d.<br \/>But the leaked documents tell a different story.&nbsp;<br \/>As of December 2020, Ethiopia was categorised as having the weakest level of protection among the countries the civic integrity team had identified as at risk. In an attached rubric, this level is described as: \u201cWe are still blind to the extent of the problem.\u201d<br \/>And basic safety features that are available to US and Western audiences are not available to many Ethiopian users, the same document shows; despite the clear risks, Ethiopian users are without protection against misinformation, civic harassment, civic spam and fake accounts.<br \/>This leaves them vulnerable to the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that accompanied the massacre in Aykel, and has been a consistent, hate-filled soundtrack to Ethiopia\u2019s civil war.<br \/><strong><em>The Continent, is an award-winning pan-African newspaper, published by Adamela Trust with the Mail &amp; Guardian<\/em>. <a href=\"https:\/\/mg.co.za\/thecontinent\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Download your free copy here<\/a>. <\/strong><br \/>Subscribe to the M&#038;G today for just <strong>R30<\/strong> for the first three months (then R250\/quarter). 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Material may not be published or reproduced in any form without prior written permission.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/mg.co.za\/africa\/2021-11-22-facebook-fails-to-curb-the-spread-of-hate-speech-in-ethiopia\/\">source<\/a><\/p>\n<!--CusAds0-->\n<div style=\"font-size: 0px; height: 0px; line-height: 0px; margin: 0; padding: 0; clear: both;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0Subscribe or Login\u00a0Subscribe or LoginOn 30 August, nine months into Ethiopia\u2019s civil war, a Facebook user who goes by the name Northern Patriot Tewodros Kebede Ayo posted a clear incitement to violence on his page.He accused the Qimant, an ethnic minority in Ethiopia\u2019s Amhara region, of supporting the opposition forces. He called them \u201csnitches\u201d, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"googlesitekit_rrm_CAow1sXXCw:productID":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-classe"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}