From Kenya The National Integration and Integration Commission (NCIC), a government agency that aims to eliminate ethnic or racial discrimination among the country’s 45 tribes, has give Facebook seven days to address hate speech related to next month’s election on its platform. If social media fails to do so, it will face domestic suspension. The agency’s warning came shortly after the international NGO Global Witness and the legal non-profit organization Foxglove release a report details how Facebook approves ads written to incite ethnic violence in both English and Swahili.
The organizations teamed up to conduct a study that examined Facebook’s ability to detect hate speech and calls for ethnic-based violence ahead of elections in Kenya. As Global Witness explained in its report, the country’s politics are polarized and dominated by ethnicity – after the 2007 election, for example, 1,300 people were killed and hundreds of thousands more. have to leave home. More people use the social network today than in 2007 and more than 20% of Kenya’s population use Facebook, where hate speech and misinformation are major problems.
The teams decided not to publish the exact ads they submitted for the test because they were so offensive, but they used real-life examples of hate speech commonly used in Kenya. These include comparing specific tribal groups to animals and calling for the rape, slaughter and beheading of their members. Global Witness reports: “We’re surprised and worried,” all examples of hate speech in both [English and Swahili] The NCIC says reports by NGOs corroborate their own findings.
After the organizations asked Facebook to comment on what they had discovered and therefore informed Facebook about the research, Meta published a post detailing how it prepared for Kenya’s elections. In it, the company says it has built a more advanced content detection technology and has hired dedicated teams of Swahili speakers to help it “remove harmful content quickly and efficiently.” tissue.” To see if Facebook actually made the changes that improved its detection system, the organizations resubmitted their test ads. They were approved again.
In a statement sent to Global Witness and GizmodoMeta said it had taken “extensive steps” to “arrest hate speech and incitement in Kenya” and that the company was “intensifying these efforts ahead of the election.” However, it also says that there will be cases where it misses things “because both machines and humans make mistakes.”
Global Witness says its study results follow a similar pattern it has previously discovered in Myanmar, where Facebook plays a role in allow calls for ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslims. It also follows a similar pattern that the organization discovered in Ethiopia in which the bad guys used Facebook to incite violence. Organizations and Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen are now calling on Facebook to implement the “Smash the Glass” package of emergency measures it took after it January 6, 2021 Attack on the US Capitol. They also asked the social network to halt paid digital ads in Kenya until the end of the election on August 9.
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