Former Meta employees are raising the curtain on the company’s inability to tackle controversial content, especially in Hebrew.
Meta is struggling with posts linked to the Gaza genocide when published in Hebrew as per new documents by the company’s ex-employee. They have trouble evaluating content in that language while they can tackle posts in Arabic with ease.
It’s alarming as the company did make changes to its internal policies to put an end to this.
The guidelines that were shared in recent times showed how workers took the lead for content moderation with a multilayer process in place. This is used to see how accurate the posts are but when they’re in Hebrew, no such system is in place.
While the employee making the claims was not revealed by name, he also made some more shocking revelations. These were in line with the voices of Palestinians who constantly bashed the company for showing prejudice.
Employees who are in charge of content moderation do struggle a lot but they are fearful of putting forward concerns. This is because they risk retaliation and hence would be removed from the company. Again, these allegations were voiced in a letter signed by close to 200 workers at Meta.
This means Meta’s least concern is ensuring content is safe and accurate because it continues to struggle with Hebrew moderation.
The documents are very recent and date back to a few months back. Moreover, the news comes at a time when many of the company’s apps were scrutinized for poor content moderation systems. This includes many Palestinian advocates accusing Meta of supporting the genocide carried out by Israel.
However, we are not very surprised by this report. Meta has been facing criticism on this front for a long time now. When one of Facebook’s whistleblowers lifted the lid in front of the Senate on how just 9% of Meta’s audience was English speaking, many were shocked as 87% of its spending to tackle online misinformation was spent here.
Meta did respond fiercely to those stats, adding how it hired a lot of third parties to fact-check and review online content from outside the US. Hence, they claim that this is the real percentage of workers tackling the issue.
This news is certainly not great for Meta’s image. For so long, it’s been slammed for showing biases toward content moderation regarding the Gaza genocide for so long.
Image: DIW-Aigen
Read next: Surprise For Advertisers As Google Ads Mysteriously Show Up On X
