In a 3rd test, Facebook still fails to block hate speech – The Journal

Facebook is letting violent hate speech slip through its controls in Kenya, according to a new report from the nonprofit groups Global Witness and Foxglove Facebook is letting violent hate speech slip through its controls in Kenya as it has in other countries, according to a new report from the nonprofit groups Global Witness and Foxglove. It is the third such test of Facebook’s ability to detect hateful language – either via artificial intelligence or human moderators – that the groups have run, and that the company has failed. The ads, which the groups submitted both in English and in Swahili, spoke of beheadings, rape and bloodshed. They compared people to donkeys and goats. Some also included profanity and grammatical errors. The Swahili language ads easily made it through Facebook’s detection systems and were approved for publication. As for the English ads, some were rejected at first, but only because they contained profanities and mistakes in addition to hate speech. Once the profanities were removed and grammar errors fixed, however, the ads – still calling for killings and containing obvious hate speech – went through without a hitch. “We were surprised to see that our ads had for the first…
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