Facebook has many resources to moderate content in English, thus avoiding hate speech and Fake News, but in other languages they are not as effective.
Now it seems that things could change something in this regard, as defenders of civil liberties in the United States are working to raise awareness about the apparent disinterest of Facebook in moderating publications in Spanish.
Several organizations are concerned with the issue, including the Center for American Progress, the Free Press, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and the Real Facebook Oversight Board. They said Facebook has continually ignored warnings from experts who have pointed out rampant misinformation targeting Spanish-speakers in the United States, something that affects all Spanish-speaking countries as well.
They comment on Gizmodo that Facebook is aware of this issue, and that the company has knowingly neglected the misinformation directed at Spanish speakers, in fact an anonymous source said that company officials have shown indifference to abuses in languages other than English.
What is requested is the following:
To address the rampant misinformation in Spanish in the US, we asked Facebook to publicly identify an executive-level manager to oversee the content moderation policy and enforcement in this language, to publicly explain the algorithm translation process, and content moderation and sharing of training materials used to review content for violation of existing policy.
The hashtag to draw attention to the topic is #YaBastaFacebook, which asks for more details of the platform’s machine learning algorithms dedicated to translating and detecting abusive posts. They also ask Facebook to reveal how many Spanish-language content moderators it currently employs, in addition to the total number of US moderators, and to share the materials used to train those employees.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify before members of the House Commerce and Energy Committee on March 25 along with Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. so it is possible that we will have news on the subject shortly.
