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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

#61

Post by marci »

uncomputation wrote: post #45
Banana699 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not a common confusion at all though. No one would ever confuse Italian for English because they use the same script. It’s only “common” wrt Arabic script languages.

"Facebook is bad at moderating the Latin alphabet. For the Arabic script, it’s a disaster."

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

#62

Post by Jiro »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #39
Jiro wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The "other families" is Facebook. The crime of the "other families" is censorship. "Turning other families in to the police" is cracking down on Facebook censorship. "Turning other families into the police so they can be the only criminals around" is cracking down on Facebook censorship so they can be censors instead.

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

#63

Post by 5560675260 »

uncomputation wrote: post #45
Banana699 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not a common confusion at all though. No one would ever confuse Italian for English because they use the same script. It’s only “common” wrt Arabic script languages.

Only if you already know Italian or English. Personally I would easily confuse Italian with Spanish or Portuguese.

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

#64

Post by pphysch »

ronsor wrote: post #14
fennecfoxen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.insider.com/momo-challenge-hoax-japanese-sculptu... > The sculpture appears to be Aisawa's interpretation of the Japanese folklore character, Ubume, the representation of the ghost of a woman who died during childbirth ... parents started claiming the image was popping up in YouTube videos, instructing children to kill themselves and keep the clips secret from parents ... There were no screenshots or reco…

> hoax was spread by celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Kehlani > listening to celebrities That's your real problem right there.

With the important caveat that most American politicians and intellectuals are essentially celebrities -- they are not focused on governance or discovery but rather on promoting and monetizing their personal image & power, because that's what our society incentivizes.

Someone who blindly follows the Kardashians is not necessarily worse off epistemically than someone who blindly follows Biden/Trump/AOC/Boebert or the Experts on NPR/Fox/CBS/HN.

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

#66

Post by ewmiller »

rich_sasha wrote: post #24
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…

Some language nerdiness: Persian (Farsi), and main languages of Afghanistan (Pashto and Tajik) are all indo-european, so the same language family as Indian Subcontinent and (most) European languages. Arabic is from a whole different family tree of Semitic languages, which also includes Hebrew and Maltese (go figure). They are totally different to indo-european languages.

That's fascinating, thanks for the insight.

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

#67

Post by GravitasFailure »

oh_sigh wrote: post #59
GravitasFailure wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...family tree of Semitic languages, which also includes...Maltese Okay. I did NOT see that one coming. In retrospect they're not exactly far from other Arabic-speaking countries, but I'm curious what the history is. I've also heard that Sicilian retains some features that differentiates it from Italian and suggests different roots, so I wonder if there's a connection there with Maltese.

Malta was conquered by North African Islamic caliphate around ~800AD, and then 200 years later the Normans(yes, those normans weren't just invading England around the year 1000) came in and took it, and then 200 years after that they kicked the Muslims out. By that point the Arabic that the original invaders brought was the common language, and it developed independently from the Arabic spoken in North Africa, slowly…

Gotcha, so it does parallel Sicily pretty closely but I don't think Arabic took hold as a common language quite how it did in Malta, but this is definitely something I need to look into more deeply. Thanks!

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

#68

Post by naturalauction »

treeman79 wrote: post #49
uncomputation wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a common confusion at all though. No one would ever confuse Italian for English because they use the same script. It’s only “common” wrt Arabic script languages.

I imagine eastern cultures would find Italian and English rather similar.

Pashto, Dari, Italian, and English are all Indo-European languages. Arabic is not. In other words Afghan languages are closer to English than they are to Arabic.

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

#69

Post by revolvingocelot »

Jiro wrote: post #62
revolvingocelot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The "other families" is Facebook. The crime of the "other families" is censorship. "Turning other families in to the police" is cracking down on Facebook censorship. "Turning other families into the police so they can be the only criminals around" is cracking down on Facebook censorship so they can be censors instead.

> The "other families" is Facebook. The crime of the "other families" is censorship. "Turning other families in to the police" is cracking down on Facebook censorship. "Turning other families into the police so they can be the only criminals around" is cracking down on Facebook censorship so they can be censors instead.

So, let's see:

>>>>>When one Mafia family turns another one in,

When Facebook censorship is cracked down upon,

>>>>>they're doing it to get back at the other family

it's happening in order to get back at Facebook.

...what? What's "crime" again? What's "speech"? The "crime of the other families" being "censorship" elides the reality that Facebook is doing the censorship. I don't think you've really thought this through.

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

#70

Post by dane-pgp »

ehutch79 wrote: post #35
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.

Moderating the moderators seems like a much more tractable problem than moderating all the messages. In Reddit's case, that means shutting down subreddits that trigger too many complaints from people outside those subreddits (in particular, from news articles and advertisers).
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