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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

#81

Post by 908B64B197 »

Banana699 wrote: post #75
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 think your familiarity with the Latin script is coloring your perceptions a bit, I'm an arab and when I was a child I used to classify French, Italian and all languages that use Latin letters as 'English'. Growing up is not what made me realize this is wrong, it's learning English. It's very easy to imagine the other way around.

> I was a child I used to classify French, Italian and all languages that use Latin letters as 'English'.

These three have a lot of words in common. French-English share something like 30% of their respective vocabulary on top of an other 30% they both inherited from Latin. So, you were almost right!

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

#82

Post by Dma54rhs »

aorth wrote: post #72
malka wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes from 'pédé' which is slur for 'pédéraste', which means a man who has sex with other men

Rather, a man who is engaged in an erotic relationship with an adolescent boy .

At least in Eastern Europe the word was used as a synonym for both during the communism, or well at the time there was no difference between the two (piderast/pederast etc)

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

#83

Post by _bfhp »

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.

At what point did we retire the option of convincing people to stop being hateful? I didn't get the memo. It seems we want to ban whatever groups are considered "hateful" (but not the oppressed expressing their anger at the oppressor! Such an easy distinction to make) eventually leading to what, legal bans on speech?

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

#84

Post by Jiro »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #76
Jiro wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The "crime of the other families" being "censorship" elides the reality that Facebook is doing the censorship. I The whole point of having a media blitz about Facebook censorship is to force a crackdown on Facebook censorship, to ensure that censorship is done as per the wishes of the complainers, rather than as per the wishes of current Facebook. There is no contradiction between "Facebook is doing the censorship"…

>The whole point of having a media blitz about Facebook censorship is to force a crackdown on Facebook censorship, to ensure that censorship is done as per the wishes of the complainers, rather than as per the wishes of current Facebook. It's clear that you think that, but you're ignoring what's been written, by me, yourself, and TFA. "The police", which you've failed to define, seem to me in this flawed analogy to b…

"The police" would consist of government bureaucrats and cancel mobs. Facebook can be and is being reported to them with the full expectation that they will ultimately be able to force Facebook to censor in different ways.

> One Mafia family has functionally unlimited power, and verifiably censors the two other groups worldwide.

There's a media blitz about Facebook precisely because Facebook doesn't have unlimited power, and the media blitz is part of the attempt to smack them down. The media, the government, and the mob can fight Facebook on terms that give them a meaningful chance of winning.

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

#85

Post by nomel »

dannyr wrote: post #43
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…

So imagine what will happen when Facebook launches its metaverse!

I imagine you just walk away from the person or make them disappear by blocking them, as you can do in VRChat.

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

#86

Post by chespinoza »

I think the same happens for every other language but English, in the past I've reported several abusive attacks/ posts/comments in facebook (in Spanish) and later they've said that they don't see any issue, so clearly they just don't understand what you're reporting.

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

#87

Post by megaman821 »

Banana699 wrote: post #75
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 think your familiarity with the Latin script is coloring your perceptions a bit, I'm an arab and when I was a child I used to classify French, Italian and all languages that use Latin letters as 'English'. Growing up is not what made me realize this is wrong, it's learning English. It's very easy to imagine the other way around.

If you are going to write about a topic, perhaps you should have a better understanding of it and its related issues than a child would.

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

#88

Post by nradov »

999900000999 wrote: post #79
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.

By this logic Chinese, Japanese, Classical Vietnamese and Classical Korean are all sorta kinda just Chinese. Aside from being amazingly ignorant ( it can be argued Chinese dialects alone are more diverse than Romance languages) your not going to be able to have a Cantonese speaker moderate a Japanese forum. That said, why are we realistically expecting Facebook to be able to do all this. The moderation should really…

Nations can already ban usage of Facebook if they want to. We don't need to "allow" anything. But that kind of censorship takes us down a dangerous path. It would be horrible to see the rest of the world turn into China.

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

#89

Post by duskwuff »

Banana699 wrote: post #31
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.

And I suspect that Facebook's moderation problems extend to most, if not all, languages written in Arabic script. If they can't even handle languages like Spanish or French correctly (cf. other top-level comments), the chances that they'll handle languages which are more "obscure" (from a Western perspective) are basically zero.

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

#90

Post by amadeuspagel »

I can't quite express why, but this line "profit over people" creeps me out. Maybe it's this idea that there are just "people", a homogenous group that facebook can choose, or not, when really what facebook is blamed for is siding with one group of people over another - either censoring some people, or not censoring some people that other people think should be censored.
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