Social media giant Facebook could not take action or flag hate content in India, given its “lack of Hindi and Bengali classifiers”, according to a whistleblower complaint.
Whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Facebook’s practices, flagged that Facebook’s language capabilities are “inadequate” and lead to “global misinformation and ethnic violence”.
The documents submitted by Haugen are from reference research and findings by Facebook’s own researchers. Among those, some related to India, referencing what they said were fear-mongering and dehumanising content promoted by Facebook accounts allegedly run by or associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
"Despite being aware that RSS users, groups, and pages promote fear-mongering, anti-Muslim narratives, Facebook could not take action or flag the content due to its lack of Hindi and Bengali classifiers”, according to a whistleblower complaint filed before the US securities regulator, a report by The Indian Express said.
Citing an undated internal Facebook document titled “Adversarial Harmful Networks-India Case study”, Haugen said that “there were a number of dehumanising posts (on) Muslims… Our lack of Hindu and Bengali classifiers means much of this content is never flagged or actioned, and we have yet to put forth a nomination for designation of this group (RSS) given political sensitivities.”
Only 0.2 per cent of the reported hate speech is taken down by automated checks, according to the documents cited, which also flags a lack of language classifiers, which will be able to check for translations as well, said a Hindustan Times report.
Currently India is ranked among the topmost bucket of countries by Facebook in terms of its policy priorities. As of January-March 2020, India, along with Brazil and the US, is part of “Tier 0” countries, the complaint shows; “Tier 1” includes Germany, Indonesia, Iran, Israel and Italy.
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