Kenya wants to ban Facebook over hate speech
Facebook is facing increased pressure to remove violent hate speech, fake news, and other content in Africa, where lawmakers are considering new measures that critics believe would infringe on freedom of speech.
In the wake of the August 9 general elections in Kenya, Facebook flopped once again after it appallingly failed to detect hate speech ads – in the two official languages of the country: Swahili and English – submitted to the platform by the non-profit groups Global Witness and Foxglove.
The group submitted 10 ads in English and 10 in Swahili that contained hate speech calling for beheadings, rape and bloodshed. The ads also compared people to donkeys and goats, and some also included profanity and grammatical errors.
“Much to our surprise and concern, all hate speech examples in both languages were approved, with one exception: our English language hate speech ads were initially rejected for failing to comply with Facebook’s Grammar and Profanity policy. Facebook invited us to update the ads, and after making minor corrections, they were similarly accepted. Seemingly our English ads had woken up their AI systems, but not for what we expected,” the group stated in their report.
The group informed Meta about the undetected violations, and the tech company admitted to have missed some hate speech messages because of mistakes by the people and machines the platform relies on.
