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Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster

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Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster

#31

Post by Banana699 »

josh_fyi wrote: post #13

Why does it say in an article about Arabic, "In Afghanistan, where hate speech is reportedly one of the top 'abuse categories.'..." Arabic is not spoke in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, there is common ignorant generalization that Arabic is the language of Iran, Afghanistan, and other Muslim countries. To those who live there, the distinction is not insignificant. This also casts doubt on the veracity of everything else…

A charitable interpretation would be to understand the "arabic" as in "The arabic script", that is: the alphabet. This is indeed the written representation of Persian and Urdu.

It's a common confusion for some people to conflate a natural language with it's script. Compare with the similar confusion that conflates a programming language with either it's implementation or the snytax used to write it in text files.

Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster

#32

Post by xutopia »

In French it's horrible as well. They have such a naive approach it is ridiculous. One word that keeps getting banned is "pédale" which means pedal but was also used as a slur till maybe the 90s in France. Some people getting banned because they want to sell their guitar pedal... pretty ridiculous.

Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster

#33

Post by Jiro »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #22
Jiro wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When one Mafia family turns another one in, they're doing it to get back at the other family--they're not doing it because they think that crime is a bad thing. They're perfectly happy with crime, as long as they are the ones committing the crime. It's the exact same thing for censorship. The people who are complaining about Facebook censorship don't want to end censorship. It's just that they want to be the ones doi…

Comparing Facebook to the cops and ideologically aligned groups of users to Mafia families is a strange analogy. Not sure why you chose it, except maybe to imply things. One of the things that your analogy implies is that speech is criminal. Many, including the actual cops, believe certain kinds of speech indeed are. But who is saying what?

No, the analogy is that censorship is criminal. We have one set of criminals (people complaining about Facebook) wanting to turn in another set of criminals (crackdown on Facebook censorship) so that they're the only criminals around (they want to be in control of the censorship). They don't actually want to stop crime (they don't actually want to stop censorship).

Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster

#34

Post by Ajedi32 »

I'm starting to think centralized moderation is just a bad idea in general for sites of Facebook's size and reach. It doesn't scale well, can't easily adapt to other cultures, and has all sorts of problems with neutrality and subjectivity that are inherent to the very idea of centralized control.

Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with crowdsourced moderation via downvotes and flags, community-appointed moderators and the like, though it's true those systems come with their own set problems. A truly decentralized system where each user chooses their own moderation system could be even better in my opinion, at least in theory, but we're some ways off from that being viable from a practical perspective.

Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster

#35

Post by ehutch79 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #34

I'm starting to think centralized moderation is just a bad idea in general for sites of Facebook's size and reach. It doesn't scale well, can't easily adapt to other cultures, and has all sorts of problems with neutrality and subjectivity that are inherent to the very idea of centralized control. Sites like Reddit, HN, and Stack Overflow do a much better job with crowdsourced moderation via downvotes and flags, commu…

It helps, but you still have to deal with groups that are intentionally toxic or problematic.

Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster

#36

Post by Ajedi32 »

jklinger410 wrote: post #9

Moderating is so hard it will probably the first application for AI with generalized intelligence.

Personally I think it feels kinda dystopian for an AI to be deciding what human beings are allowed to say; _especially_ if it's highly effective.

There was a comment from another user I favorited a while back which reflects my thoughts on the topic of AI-driven moderation pretty well[1]:

> I find censorship via algorithms extremely scary. There will be false positives and false negatives and there is absolutely zero recourse. Censorship by algorithms is a perfect expression of bureaucracy. In perfect bureaucracies, responsibilty is spread so thinly that it's impossible to determine who is responsible for a mistake. With algorithms, there's actually no human on the hook at all. Are you going to blame the programmers?

> By all means, use machine learning to flag posts so humans can look at them. But automating the removal of content and the banning of human users is a road I strongly suspect we will regret going down. If the volume of content is sufficient so that you need to use algorithms to remove human-generated content then I'd say it's time to reconsider whether that content should be removed at all.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867975

Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster

#37

Post by kube-system »

jklinger410 wrote: post #9

Moderating is so hard it will probably the first application for AI with generalized intelligence.

Humans already have generalized intelligence and this is the result of that. All generalized AI will do is help us systematically make the same mistakes at scale.

Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster

#38

Post by selimthegrim »

josh_fyi wrote: post #13

Why does it say in an article about Arabic, "In Afghanistan, where hate speech is reportedly one of the top 'abuse categories.'..." Arabic is not spoke in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, there is common ignorant generalization that Arabic is the language of Iran, Afghanistan, and other Muslim countries. To those who live there, the distinction is not insignificant. This also casts doubt on the veracity of everything else…

There are large Arab communities in the north near Kunduz. Not all of them have retained their ancestral language but some have.

Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster

#39

Post by revolvingocelot »

Jiro wrote: post #33
revolvingocelot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing Facebook to the cops and ideologically aligned groups of users to Mafia families is a strange analogy. Not sure why you chose it, except maybe to imply things. One of the things that your analogy implies is that speech is criminal. Many, including the actual cops, believe certain kinds of speech indeed are. But who is saying what?

No, the analogy is that censorship is criminal. We have one set of criminals (people complaining about Facebook) wanting to turn in another set of criminals (crackdown on Facebook censorship) so that they're the only criminals around (they want to be in control of the censorship). They don't actually want to stop crime (they don't actually want to stop censorship).

>No, the analogy is that censorship is criminal

No, that's not right. Above, you likened cops to Facebook and groups of users to Mafia families who tattle on the crime of other families in order to stymie them. The Mafia does crime, while groups of users do speech; the cops catch and punish crime, while Facebook censors speech. The "only criminals around" won't be in control of the censorship unless you're suggesting that a group of users is going to unilaterally take over Facebook.

...Are you? Which one?

Re: Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster

#40

Post by annadane »

The moderation would be one thing if there could be an argument that the platform generally acts in good faith, but they don't. They seem to both have the Google problem that you absolutely can not reach anyone if you get banned by accident (and bye bye to your social graph if that happens, which is made all the worse because they insist on integrating all their services into one like IG/WA) and they also don't ban things that are reported and which ought to be banned
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