It probably won't end Facebook scandalsI now feel that it is one of the heads of evil in the world represented by Mark Zuckerberg, its chairman, and among the new scandals is the exit of one of the managers from Facebook to expose the company’s bad practices in several areas, especially content management, which leads to bad results and favors the company’s financial interest above all, Among these practices is neglecting or incorrectly managing our content in the Arab world.

Facebook neglects content management in the Arab world


Why do we need content management?

Facebook neglects content management in the Arab world

Most of the time, big companies have to manage their content to fit the bill. The platform should not increase interaction with posts that incite violence or racism, etc. So companies manage the content by placing human monitors as well as artificial intelligence and the latter bears most of the management since humans cannot alone monitor millions of posts. And when the AI ​​finds a bad post and deletes it, humans sometimes check it out to verify that it hasn't made a mistake.


what's the problem?

Facebook is now present in many countries of the world, and in many countries there are no widespread Internet services, but there is a free Facebook through agreements with telecommunications companies. For some residents of these countries, the meaning of the Internet is Facebook, but the company does not manage content in the same way in every market in which it is located. It finds content management in English and in North America, in stages, better than managing content in the Arab region, then you find African and Asian countries that are almost non-existent. Managing content in a way that negatively affects society and even leads to crimes across the platform, ranging from small problems to major crimes such as human trafficking.


The company wants to interact

The Facebook platform prefers posts with high interaction and delivers them to many people in order to earn more, but the problem with these types of posts is that the most interaction is the posts that contain gay opinions, fights, or something polarizing such as political battles. With this, the platform exited from its primary role as a means of communication between family and friends into an open space for quarrels and the development of abnormal or wrong ideas. Only if it gets a lot of interaction, whether negative or positive, it does not matter. If you comment on a post in agreement or disagreement with it, this is considered an interaction and leads to it reaching more people.


underspending

Facebook wants a presence in all countries of the world but does not want to spend to improve content monitoring everywhere, especially in markets that do not generate profits parallel to the profits in richer countries and where governments also do not care about Facebook's efforts to monitor content well. There are even governments taking advantage of this, as is happening in Myanmar and using the Facebook platform to target Muslims there.


The problem with the Arabic language

Among the many problems of Facebook's preferential policies, the problem of the Arabic language has emerged mainly. Users in the Arab region spend more time on Facebook than any other geographic region, but with this, the company still does not invest well in the Arabic language and manage the content written in it. So it always happens that posts are deleted or their owners are accused of inciting hate speech or the like just because the artificial intelligence has misunderstood the language. In fact, sometimes warnings are placed on pictures of a book of remembrances, for example. Apart from the artificial intelligence system, the human system is also not good, as most Facebook content managers in the Arab world are concentrated in Casablanca - Morocco only and they manage content for all the region, including the different dialects, so it is natural that many, many errors occur, and although these employees Claiming to know all Arabic dialects, they incorrectly flagged 77% of the posts they found "terrorist".

This was highlighted in the recent crisis when any publication that talks about the Zionist occupation state in Arabic was marked as a publication calling for violence or terrorism, etc. It was followed by a wave of lawsuits to rate Facebook on its software stores with one star.


Three classes of countries

In the leaked papers, it was found that Facebook categorizes countries in three categories in terms of providing electronic protection against false information and news, especially in times of elections and political changes. The highest of these categories is “Category Zero”, which includes India, the United States, and Brazil, and this category is prepared for large teams that are similar to war rooms to confront misinformation and publications that violate the rules of the platform. Then comes “Category 1”, which includes Germany, Indonesia, the Zionist occupation state, Iran, and Italy, and these countries have rooms similar to Category 0 with less management throughout the year, and then come Category 2 and 3, which are the countries with the least content management and investment by Facebook. The Arab world is in this category.

In some countries, the terms of use of the platform are not even translated into their local languages. In Afghanistan, for example, it is difficult for non-English speaking residents to file complaints as the terms of the platform are not translated into the official languages ​​spoken in the country.


comment

It is usual for companies that invest in different markets to diversify the amounts of investments in each market according to profits in it or different government pressures, but the case of Facebook is unique in that the platform has great power that can be abused poorly and can cause negative results even unexpectedly. Therefore, it is dangerous to leave the company to continue its current practices and neglect many markets, and it must invest equally in any market it decides to enter. one office. What is the solution? We don't know, we are not decision makers. But as a start, we know that the company must be held accountable for its mistakes and look at it carefully, rather than waiting for members from within it to defect and expose its bad practices from time to time.


Do you use Facebook? What do you think of the company's practices, especially regarding the Arab world? And can you leave or replace Facebook? Share your opinion

Sources:

WIRED | TheVerge

Related articles