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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://theintercept.com/2022/09/21/facebook-censorship-palestine-israel-algorithm/">theintercept.com</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Facebook Report Concludes Company Censorship Violated Palestinian Human Rights</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Sam Biddle - September 21, 2022<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div><p><u>Facebook and Instagram’s</u>
speech policies harmed fundamental human rights of Palestinian users
during a conflagration that saw heavy Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip
last May, according to a study commissioned by the social media sites’
parent company Meta.</p>
<p>“Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human
rights impact … on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of
expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and
non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to
share information and insights about their experiences as they
occurred,” says the long-awaited report, which was obtained by The
Intercept in advance of its publication.</p>
<p>Commissioned by Meta last year and conducted by the independent
consultancy Business for Social Responsibility, or BSR, the report
focuses on the company’s censorship practices and allegations of bias
during bouts of violence against Palestinian people by Israeli forces
last spring.</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>“Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact.”</p></blockquote><div><p>Following <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/05/24/israeli-police-round-palestinian-protesters-global-attention-fades/">protests</a> over the <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/05/14/israel-settler-evictions-jerusalem-nonprofits/">forcible eviction</a> of <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/05/15/israel-apartheid-palestine-jerusalem/">Palestinian families</a>
from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli
police cracked down on protesters in Israel and the West Bank, and
launched military airstrikes against Gaza that injured thousands of
Palestinians, killing 256, including 66 children, <a href="https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Occupied%20Palestinian%20Territory%20%28oPt%29%20-%20Response%20to%20the%20escalation%20in%20the%20oPt%20-%20Situation%20Report%20No.%201%2C%2021%20-%2027%20May%202021.pdf">according to the United Nations</a>. Many Palestinians <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/facebook-employees-questioned-apparent-restrictions-palestinian-activists-account/story?id=80824995">attempting</a> to <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/instagram-facebook-censored-al-aqsa-mosque">document</a> and <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/10/08/israel/palestine-facebook-censors-discussion-rights-issues">protest the violence</a> using Facebook and Instagram found their posts spontaneously <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/may/26/pro-palestine-censorship-facebook-instagram">disappeared</a> without recourse, a phenomenon the BSR inquiry attempts to explain.</p>
<p>Last month, over a dozen civil society and human rights groups <a href="https://dawnmena.org/meta-must-release-assessment-of-content-moderation-in-palestine/">wrote an open letter</a>
protesting Meta’s delay in releasing the report, which the company had
originally pledged to release in the “first quarter” of the year.</p>
<p>While BSR credits Meta for taking steps to improve its policies, it
further blames “a lack of oversight at Meta that allowed content policy
errors with significant consequences to occur.”</p></div><div><p>Though
BSR is clear in stating that Meta harms Palestinian rights with the
censorship apparatus it alone has constructed, the report absolves Meta
of “intentional bias.” Rather, BSR points to what it calls
“unintentional bias,” instances “where Meta policy and practice,
combined with broader external dynamics, does lead to different human
rights impacts on Palestinian and Arabic speaking users” — a nod to the
fact that these systemic flaws are by no means limited to the events of
May 2021.</p>
<p>Meta responded to the BSR report in a document to be circulated along
with the findings. (Meta did not respond to The Intercept’s request for
comment about the report by publication time.) In a footnote in the
response, which was also obtained by The Intercept, the company wrote,
“Meta’s publication of this response should not be construed as an
admission, agreement with, or acceptance of any of the findings,
conclusions, opinions or viewpoints identified by BSR, nor should the
implementation of any suggested reforms be taken as admission of
wrongdoing.”</p>
<p><u>According to the</u> findings of BSR’s report, Meta deleted Arabic
content relating to the violence at a far greater rate than
Hebrew-language posts, confirming long-running complaints of disparate
speech enforcement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The disparity,
the report found, was perpetuated among posts reviewed both by human
employees and automated software.</p>
<p>“The data reviewed indicated that Arabic content had greater
over-enforcement (e.g., erroneously removing Palestinian voice) on a per
user basis,” the report says. “Data reviewed by BSR also showed that
proactive detection rates of potentially violating Arabic content were
significantly higher than proactive detection rates of potentially
violating Hebrew content.”</p></div><div><p>BSR attributed the vastly differing treatment of Palestinian and Israeli posts to the <a href="https://restofworld.org/2021/newsletter-south-asia-facebooks-language-problem/">same</a> <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-languages-insight/facebooks-flood-of-languages-leaves-it-struggling-to-monitor-content-idUSKCN1RZ0DW">systemic</a> problems rights groups, <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-global-reach-exceeds-linguistic-grasp/">whistleblowers</a>, and <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/facebook-india-hate-speech-equality-labs">researchers</a> have all blamed for the company’s past <a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog/facebooks-content-moderation-failures-ethiopia">humanitarian</a> <a href="https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-facebook-hate/">failures</a>: a<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/24/india-facebook-misinformation-hate-speech/"> dismal lack of expertise</a>. Meta, a company with <a href="https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2022/Meta-Reports-Second-Quarter-2022-Results/default.aspx">over $24 billion in cash reserves</a>,
lacks staff who understand other cultures, languages, and histories,
and is using faulty algorithmic technology to govern speech around the
world, the BSR report concluded.</p>
<p>Not only do Palestinian users face an algorithmic screening that
Israeli users do not — an “Arabic hostile speech classifier” that uses
machine learning to flag potential policy violations and has no Hebrew
equivalent — the report notes that the Arabic system also doesn’t work
well: “Arabic classifiers are likely less accurate for Palestinian
Arabic than other dialects, both because the dialect is less common, and
because the training data — which is based on the assessments of human
reviewers — likely reproduces the errors of human reviewers due to lack
of linguistic and cultural competence.”</p>
<p>Human employees appear to have exacerbated the lopsided effects of
Meta’s speech-policing algorithms. “Potentially violating Arabic content
may not have been routed to content reviewers who speak or understand
the specific dialect of the content,” the report says. It also notes
that Meta didn’t have enough Arabic and Hebrew-speaking staff on hand to
manage the spike in posts.</p></div><div><p>These
faults had cascading speech-stifling effects, the report continues.
“Based on BSR’s review of tickets and input from internal stakeholders, a
key over-enforcement issue in May 2021 occurred when users accumulated
‘false’ strikes that impacted visibility and engagement after posts were
erroneously removed for violating content policies.” In other words,
wrongful censorship begat further wrongful censorship, leaving the
affected wondering why no one could see their posts. “The human rights
impacts … of these errors were more severe given a context where rights
such as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and safety were
of heightened significance, especially for activists and journalists,”
the report says.</p>
<p><u>Beyond Meta’s failures</u> in triaging posts about Sheikh Jarrah,
BSR also points to the company’s “Dangerous Individuals and
Organizations” policy — referred to as “DOI” in the report — a roster of
thousands of people and groups that Meta’s billions of users cannot
“praise,” “support,” or “represent.” The full list, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/10/12/facebook-secret-blacklist-dangerous/">obtained and published</a>
by The Intercept last year, showed that the policy focuses mostly on
Muslim and Middle Eastern entities, which critics described as a recipe
for glaring ethnic and religious bias.</p>
<p>Meta claims that it’s legally compelled to censor mention of groups
designated by the U.S. government, but legal scholars have disputed the
company’s interpretation of federal anti-terrorism laws. Following The
Intercept’s report on the list, the Brennan Center for Justice <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/so-what-does-facebook-take-down-secret-list-dangerous-individuals-and">called</a> the company’s claims of legal obligation a “fiction.”</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>“Meta’s
DOI policy and the list are more likely to impact Palestinian and
Arabic-speaking users, both based upon Meta’s interpretation of legal
obligations, and in error.”</p></blockquote><div><p>BSR
agrees the policy is systemically biased: “Legal designations of
terrorist organizations around the world have a disproportionate focus
on individuals and organizations that have identified as Muslim, and
thus Meta’s DOI policy and the list are more likely to impact
Palestinian and Arabic-speaking users, both based upon Meta’s
interpretation of legal obligations, and in error.”</p>
<p>Palestinians are particularly vulnerable to the effects of the
blacklist, according to the report: “Palestinians are more likely to
violate Meta’s DOI policy because of the presence of Hamas as a
governing entity in Gaza and political candidates affiliated with
designated organizations. DOI violations also come with particularly
steep penalties, which means Palestinians are more likely to face
steeper consequences for both correct and incorrect enforcement of
policy.”</p>
<p>The document concludes with a list of 21 nonbinding policy
recommendations, including increased staffing capacity to properly
understand and process Arabic posts, implementing a Hebrew-compatible
algorithm, increased company oversight of outsourced moderators, and
both reforms to and increased transparency around the “Dangerous
Individuals and Organizations” policy.</p>
<p>In its response to the report, Meta vaguely commits to implement or
consider implementing aspects of 20 out of 21 the recommendations. The
exception is a call to “Fund public research into the optimal
relationship between legally required counterterrorism obligations and
the policies and practices of social media platforms,” which the company
says it will not pursue because it does not wish to provide legal
guidance for other companies. Rather, Meta suggests concerned experts
reach out directly to the federal government.</p></div></div></div></div>
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