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[ABUJA/NEW DELHI] Bharat Nayak, an India-based fact-checker, monitors more than 176 Hindi WhatsApp groups as part of a research effort he is conducting on data ingestion among Indians.
Until a few months ago, he ran as editor-in-chief of Indian fact-checking and virtual news site The Logical Indian, overseeing the production of fact-checks in the form of text articles, videos, and social media posts.
Often, he took it upon himself to debunk viral news, effortlessly embracing Hindi and English with a familiar prop in the central and northern states of India.
Today, as an independent fact-checker, Nayak embarks on research, tracking the media landscape, as well as projects focused on media literacy for the public.
“In that there are almost no places where we communicate about fact-checking,” says Nayak, who is also a professor at the Google News Initiative.
“Or if there is any misinformation being spread, no one replies with the fact-check.”
Nayak says he and other fact-checkers have found that accurate data posted in various Indian languages is flagged through Facebook as dissident data, while fact-checkers themselves are rarely classified as dissenting data.
To Nayak and other digital media experts interviewed by SciDev.Net, it is clear that little attention is paid by social media platforms to false news in non-European languages.
In the absence of any data, the true scale of misinformation in lesser-spoken languages is unknown, says Nigerian journalist Hannah Ajakaiye, an International Center For Journalists Knight Fellow at FactsMatterNG, an initiative to promote information integrity and public media literacy in Nigeria.
She believes there is a strong connection between language and acceptance. “It makes [misinformation in lesser-spoken languages] more dangerous,” he says, explaining that other people are more likely to believe what they read is true.
Fact-checking organisations like these often work round the clock, tracking false information linked to trending topics, to counter misinformation and disinformation.
Watchdog organisations have consistently demanded a misinformation crackdown on platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and messaging apps like WhatsApp. All these big tech platforms have different policies to monitor, regulate and reduce misinformation.
Pressure on Big Tech to combat fake news comes and goes in cycles, observers say. During the COVID-19 outbreak, there has been increased pressure from the medical network and others to prevent fake news about the virus and vaccines.
In 2021, Facebook said it removed 18 million pieces of incorrect information about COVID-19 from Facebook and Instagram, though the number of pieces in lesser-known languages is likely only a fraction of that figure.
During the infodemic that accompanied the global fitness crisis, there was no shortage of fake content to remove.
Onyinyechi Micheal, 17, remembers her adoptive mother frantically walking into the room one night in February 2021, just after the first case of COVID-19 was detected in Nigeria. He had received an audio message on a Facebook organization informing him that eating onion and ginger broth would harm him. save you from COVID-19 infection.
“Health advice” in the Igbo language is shared among an entirely Igbo group. Micheal never contracted the virus, but he doesn’t know if it was due to the broth or one of the later concoctions he took to protect himself from the virus.
While drinking onion and ginger soup arguably wouldn’t have harmed Michael, as COVID-19 deaths rose, so did false medical recommendations on social media platforms, which have become imperative for connectivity and the dissemination of data about the pandemic.
Millions of text articles, videos and audio clips – mostly about health – were churned out globally in thousands of languages. In the absence of a cure or access to a vaccine, netizens relied on viral health tips from within their communities, speaking their language.
Combating this cycle of misinformation in many languages and across geographies is proving difficult.
Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc. , has about 3 billion active users. In 2016, Meta introduced a third-party fact-checking partnership of up to 90 qualified independent fact-checking organizations through the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). Although it has been praised for its instrumental role in debunking fake news, Western-language content turns out to have taken a back seat, online media specialists say.
Peter Cunliffe-Jones, advisory board member of the IFCN, acknowledges that big techs have made progress in combating misinformation, but says they have not done a good job of countering the spread of harmful information generally and especially in regional, local, or lesser-known languages.
“It is true that some platforms – Meta platforms among them – have done more recently to increase the number of languages in which they respond to misinformation,” he told SciDev.Net by email.
However, he cautioned that this is not enough.
“Everyone wants to do so much more,” he said, adding, “Ultimately, the effects of disinformation will be felt by everyone, everywhere. “
YouTube claims to have transparent rules about incorrect information and removes anything that violates those rules.
IFCN’s State of the Fact Checkers 2022 report notes that Meta’s third-party fact-checking program is the largest source of investment for fact-checking organizations, contributing 45. 2% of their revenue. However, neither Meta’s website nor the report mentions how this investment was distributed in other languages.
Over the course of a months-long investigation, SciDev. Net proved how third-party fact-checking differs in the local and regional languages of Nigeria and India from the English language.
Meta relies on two tactics to combat fake news: synthetic intelligence and a network of trusted partners, independent third-party fact-checking organizations, and their users.
Niam Yaraghi, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a U. S. -based think tank, noted in a comment that Facebook relies on its network of users to flag incorrect information and then “uses an army of genuine humans to monitor that content within its network. “24 hours. ” hours to determine if they are violating their terms of use. “
Yaraghi claims that live content is monitored through humans “once it reaches a certain point of popularity. “
However, things get confusing when other languages are mixed. Nigeria and India together have more than 1. 6 billion people who speak thousands of languages and dialects.
Social media platforms thrive in dozens of languages in those countries, but the attention they pay to them (to fact-check or allocate resources) is asymmetrical to that of countries in the Global North.
Onyinyechi doesn’t know the exact organization from which his adoptive parents received this data about the broth, but even today there are network teams that push misleading narratives of this kind.
“Local languages are a haven for disinformers. Without much care, they are used to circumvent controls,” says Allwell Okpi, researcher and network director at Africa Check, a fact-checking platform from Meta Platforms Inc. in Nigeria.
Content varies widely, according to our survey.
Meta’s online page states that “WhatsApp has invested $1 million in IFCN’s COVID-19 efforts, adding the CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, in which approximately one hundred fact-checking organizations in more than 70 countries produced more than 11,000 COVID-19 fact-checks. pandemic in 2019. 40 languages. “
Meta-owned WhatsApp also introduced a $500,000 grant program to help the projects of seven fact-checking organizations combating vaccine misinformation, in partnership with IFCN, Meta’s Array noted.
“Meta, Google, and others do a lot of painting about fake news when there’s rumors about it and they’re asked about the same thing,” Nayak says.
“Once the buzz around them subsides, the attention paid to them begins to wane. “This is noticeable in emerging countries such as India, he says.
The lack of action to combat news is linked to low investment and a lack of resources, says Rafiq Copeland, senior advisor for platform accountability at Internews, a nonprofit media organization.
Global south countries are “certainly the largest markets in terms of users. But the advertising revenue that the companies receive per user is much higher in the US and Europe,” says Copeland.
Although the majority of users of platforms like Facebook are in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America, he says they “account for about a portion or less of the total revenue collected through the company. “The comparative investment made through language varies, he explains.
In 2021, most of Meta’s profits came from the United States ($48. 4 billion), followed by the European region, adding Russia and Turkey ($29 billion). The Asia-Pacific region generated $26. 7 billion, while companies in Africa and Latin America generated $26. 7 billion. and the Middle East earned $10. 6 billion.
More than 90% of Meta’s cash inflow in the second quarter of 2023 was generated through advertising, a profit of $31. 5 billion on total cash inflow of $32 billion.
India is the world’s top source of social media misinformation on COVID-19, according to a study by researchers at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh, published in 2021. With over 496 million people in the country on Meta platforms as of September 2023, there are only 11 third party fact-checking partners in India together tackling 16 languages, including English. The country has the highest number of Meta third-party fact-checkers.
Meanwhile, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, with a population of more than two hundred million, has more than 500 indigenous languages and 31. 60 million social media users, most of whom are active on Meta platforms. It was ranked 23rd on the social ranking COVID-19 media misinformation list.
Here, Meta has three third-party fact-checkers (Dubai, Africa Check, and Associated Press News) tasked with debunking and verifying incorrect information in four languages in addition to English.
Producing fact-checks in local or lesser-spoken languages is often an in-house initiative of third-party partners. Meta, for example, currently has partners in 118 countries covering 90 languages.
According to Okpi and other fact-checkers interviewed via SciDev. Net, third-party fact-checking is still not effective in some languages. While misinformation in English can go viral, verifying it in a lesser-spoken language may not have been possible. the same scope, for example.
“A lot of what we do currently is we do the initial fact check in English and then we translate to Hausa or Yoruba to ensure that the language’s audience can access it,” says Kemi Busari, editor at Nigerian fact-checking organisation Dubawa.
“The goal is to go further.
“We’ll do it in Igbo, Kanuri and Krio. We’ll do 3 in Ghana and a few more before the end of this year.
SciDev. Net found that Meta will pay at least $300 to $500 based on fact-checking.
But verifying hyperlocal and user-generated content, in lesser-spoken languages, is a bit more complicated and requires more resources to uncover the truth, says Bharath Guniganti, fact-checker at Hyderabad-based Factly. Bilingual and spousal platform that offers policies in Telugu and English.
Fact-checking mainstream claims, in English or dominant languages, can usually be done easily because there is a digital trail. However, content produced by users locally is harder to verify as it may need on-ground resources, he says.
“We want more newsrooms as a component of the initiative, we want more focus, we want more voices [fact-checkers] in communities, because the data we know evolves in other ways,” Busari adds.
Internews’ Copeland argues that platforms want to invest in language equality. And even this wants to be subsidized through “transparency and accountability to show that investments have been made,” he said.
Internews took a look at Meta’s Trusted Partner Program, another initiative aimed at preventing harm to Meta products and protecting users. This includes organizations and users alerting the company to harmful content, destructive trends, and other dangers online and even questioning Facebook and Instagram’s decisions. on behalf of at-risk users around the world.
In its 2023 report, Safety At Stake: How to save Meta’s Trusted Partner Program, Internews found several red flags, including understaffing, lack of resources, erratic and delayed responses to urgent threats raised by the partners, and disparity of services based on geography.
“While Ukrainian partners can expect a reaction within 72 hours, in Ethiopia, reports related to the Tigray war may go unanswered for several months,” the report says.
Internews and Localization Labs published research into Google and Meta’s network policies in 4 other non-Western languages in January 2023. They found that the policies of both platforms involve “systemic errors and that English references were not applicable and lacked human scrutiny. “for its usability. ” and understanding. ” The research calls on Meta and Google “for their efforts to speak well with the growing number of users in non-English-speaking countries. “
Both report increased resources, transparency, and accountability.
Senior fact-checkers at BoomLive, one of the third-party fact-checkers working in Hindi, Bangla and English, noted in an email interview that misinformation travels faster in local or regional languages than in English. “According to misinformation trends, a false claim associated with a video or image or audio generates mostly in Hindi and then snowballs into other languages,” they said.
In addition, incorrect information reflects trends in the media, explained Factly’s Guniganti. He added that in most cases existing events or political events dominate, but COVID-19 is an exception.
According to Meta, once an article is verified to be fake, the platform removes it but reduces the visibility of the content and informs the public to restrict the pervasiveness of this misinformation.
Social media companies have taken two approaches to combating bad data, analysts say. The first is to block that content entirely, while the second is to provide correct information along with content that is false information.
Guniganti says, “Platforms only remove disdata content that violates their network’s rules related to harm as such, but not content that provides false data because it does not constitute a violation of network rules. “
Busari agrees. Then they report false data to you [external partners] on Facebook or Instagram. And once you determine the facts, you can relay them to Facebook and they take action,” he says.
Sometimes, platforms reduce the spread of this misinformation, and the content is removed entirely.
When content is not considered destructive or violates network guidelines, it is not removed through the platform. However, here, third-party fact-checkers compare content for fake data, and Facebook provides choice data in addition to fake content. .
Nayak situations demanding this perception of damage. It states that individual content cannot be destructive or violate network guidelines, but that it is collected to cause genuine harm to society. It offers an example of how Islamophobic content has flourished during the pandemic, leading to genuine attacks on Muslims in India.
“There was a video of a man licking vegetables and fruits and that was linked to spreading Coronavirus,” he recalls. While the video wasn’t from India, it went viral on social media platforms, including messaging platforms like WhatsApp.
People said, ‘Don’t buy from Muslims or eat what they offer,'” Nayak says.
Nayak conducted a fact-check in Hinglish (a mix of Hindi and English) that went viral. But the damage has already been done.
“Even if you publish fake news, the prejudices they create will stay with you forever,” he says. “It helped anti-Muslim discourse flourish. “
“In India, COVID is unique in the sense that Muslims were blamed for the spread of COVID,” says Nayak. He considers COVID-19 to have been a turning point in which social relations between Muslims and Hindus have been damaged.
For Nayak, the actual damages are subjective. In addition, content creators take advantage of news cycles just for clicks, which further exacerbates the effect of fake news.
Even if it is assumed that incorrect information is shared through innocent users or that misinformation is created through those who intend to do harm, Copeland draws attention to a third category.
“There’s a big category of harmful content which is not intended to harm necessarily, but just intending to generate engagement,” he says.
This is misinformation for financial purposes, where content creators visit to get clicks “and ultimately, through clicks, they visit your content to monetize it,” he says. These creators post about sensitive topics such as politics or politicized issues, adding aptitude and climate.
“It’s an effective way to get clicks and it can be very profitable,” Copeland explains.
For example, an Islamic cleric in Nigeria – in a YouTube video in Hausa – claimed that the coronavirus was a Western depopulation agenda. Each video garnered more than 45,000 views between 2021 and 2022 before being flagged in a report.
For a channel that monetizes its content, traffic and engagement benefits are estimated at up to $29 per 1,000 views. One social media content influencer, who wished to be identified, told SciDev. Net that “the race for cash is real. “and that the maximum number of creators will do anything to gain ground and earn revenue.
At one point, platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok had sought regional content moderators, but due to the disparity in salaries of local and foreign staff, in addition to other professional disagreements, the procedure failed, says FactsMatterNG’s Ajakaiye.
This, coupled with lax or non-existent regulations in the Global South, has given rise to many artificial media, such as faked videos or manipulated audio files, he says.
“It’s also something that they’re not really considering,” concludes Ajakaiye. She says platforms just “bypass” misinformation in local languages “feeling it’s not important and it’s not something they really want to dedicate resources to”.
In a response to SciDev. Net, a YouTube spokesperson said the platform has transparent rules about misinformation, and added medical misinformation.
“In 2022, globally, we removed more than 140,000 videos for violating the vaccine provisions of our COVID-19 misinformation policy. These provisions came into force in October 2020,” he said.
He added that another bureaucracy of misinformation is routinely removed and that in the second quarter of 2023, YouTube removed more than 78,000 videos for violating those policies.
In 2021, the Full Fact platform, an independent fact-checking company, with a $2 million grant and expertise to build AI teams for fact-checking.
YouTube says the generation is now contributing to fact-checking efforts in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.
SciDev.Net also reached out to Meta, TikTok and Telegram for a statement but had not received a response by the time of publication.
As such, it is unclear how much resources these platforms have dedicated to combating misinformation in lesser-spoken languages in Nigeria and India or non-European languages, the number of those languages that it can detect using AI, or what would be classified as “real-world harm”.
This article was produced through the SciDev. Net World Office.
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[ABUJA/NEW DELHI] Bharat Nayak, an India-based fact-checker, monitors more than 176 Hindi-language WhatsApp groups as part of a research he is conducting into news entry among Indians.
Until a few months ago, he worked as the editor-in-chief of Indian virtual news and fact-checking The Logical Indian, overseeing the production of fact-checking in the form of text articles, videos, and social media posts.
Often, he took it upon himself to debunk viral news, effortlessly embracing Hindi and English with a familiar prop in the central and northern states of India.
Today, as an independent fact-checker, Nayak embarks on research, tracking the media landscape, as well as projects focused on media literacy for the public.
“I don’t see that [in] almost any post where we communicate about fact-checking,” says Nayak, a professor at the Google News Initiative.
“Or if there is any misinformation being spread, no one replies with the fact-check.”
Nayak says that he and other fact checkers have noticed that accurate news published in several Indian languages is often flagged by Facebook as misinformation, while the fact-checks themselves have sometimes been labelled as misinformation.
For Nayak and other virtual media experts interviewed via SciDev. Net, it is evident that social media platforms pay little attention to fake news in non-European languages.
In the absence of data, the true extent of dissension in lesser-spoken languages is unknown, says Nigerian journalist Hannah Ajakaiye, a Knight Fellow at the International Center for Journalists at FactsMatterNG, an initiative to promote integrity and public media literacy in Nigeria.
She believes there is a strong connection between language and acceptance. “It makes [misinformation in less-spoken languages] more dangerous,” she says, explaining that other people are more likely to believe what they read is true.
Fact-checking organizations like those work 24 hours a day, tracking down incorrect information similar to news topics, to counter misinformation and misinformation.
Watchdog organisations have consistently demanded a misinformation crackdown on platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and messaging apps like WhatsApp. All these big tech platforms have different policies to monitor, regulate and reduce misinformation.
Pressure on Big Tech companies to combat fake news comes and goes in cycles, observers say. During the COVID-19 outbreak, there has been increased pressure from the medical network and others to prevent fake news about the virus and vaccines.
In 2021, Facebook said it had removed 18 million pieces of misinformation about COVID-19 from Facebook and Instagram, although the number of items in lesser-known languages is likely to be a fraction of this.
During the infodemic that accompanied the global fitness crisis, there was no shortage of false content to remove.
Onyinyechi Micheal, 17, remembers her adoptive mother frantically walking into the room one night in February 2021, just after the first case of COVID-19 was detected in Nigeria. He had received an audio message on a Facebook organization informing him that eating onion and ginger broth would harm him. save you from COVID-19 infection.
The “health advice,” in the Igbo language, was shared by an exclusively Igbo group. Michael never contracted the virus, but he doesn’t know if it’s due to the broth or one of the later concoctions he took to protect himself from the virus.
While drinking onion and ginger soup might not have done Michael any harm, as COVID-19 deaths increased, so did the bogus medical recommendations on social media platforms, which became pivotal for connectivity and information dissemination during the pandemic.
Millions of text articles, videos, and audio clips (mostly about fitness) have been broadcast around the world in thousands of languages. In the absence of a cure or a vaccine, web users relied on viral recommendations from their communities and talked about fitness. your language.
Battling this cycle of false information in hundreds of languages across different geographies is proving to be hard.
Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc. , has about 3 billion active users. In 2016, Meta introduced a third-party fact-checking partnership of up to 90 qualified independent fact-checking organizations through the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). Although it has been praised for its instrumental role in debunking fake news, Western-language content turns out to have taken a backseat, virtual media specialists say.
Peter Cunliffe-Jones, a member of IFCN’s Advisory Board, acknowledges that big tech has made strides in the fight against data disdata, but says they have done a smart job of countering the spread of destructive data in general and specifically at the regional, local or minor level. Level. Languages known.
“It’s true that some platforms — adding meta-platforms — have done more recently to increase the number of languages in which they respond to misinformation,” he told SciDev. Net via email.
He warned, however, that this is not enough.
“They all need to do a lot more,” he said, adding: “Ultimately, the effects of misinformation will be felt by everyone, everywhere.”
YouTube says it has clear guidelines on misinformation and routinely takes down anything that violates these guidelines.
The IFCN’s 2022 State of the Fact Checkers report notes that Meta’s Third Party Fact-Checking programme is the leading source of funding for fact-checking organisations, contributing 45.2 per cent of their income. However, neither Meta’s site nor the report mentions how this funding was spread across different languages.
Over the course of a months-long investigation, SciDev. Net proved how third-party fact-checking differs in the local and regional languages of Nigeria and India from the English language.
Meta relies on two ways to tackle false information: artificial intelligence and a network of trusted partners, independent third-party fact-checking organisations and its users.
Niam Yaraghi, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a U. S. -based think tank, noted in a comment that Facebook relies on its network of users to flag incorrect information and then “uses an army of genuine humans to monitor that content within its network. “24 hours. ” hours to determine if they are violating their terms of use. “
Yaraghi claims that live content is monitored through humans “once it reaches a certain point of popularity. “
However, things get confusing when other languages are mixed. Nigeria and India together have more than 1. 6 billion people who speak thousands of languages and dialects.
Social media platforms thrive in dozens of languages in those countries, but the attention they pay to them (to fact-check or allocate resources) is asymmetrical to that of countries in the Global North.
Onyinyechi doesn’t know the exact organization from which his adoptive parents received this data about the broth, but even today there are network teams that push misleading narratives of this kind.
“Local languages are a haven for disinformers. Without much care, they are used to circumvent controls,” says Allwell Okpi, researcher and network director at Africa Check, a fact-checking platform from Meta Platforms Inc. in Nigeria.
Content varies widely, according to our survey.
Meta’s online page states that “WhatsApp has invested $1 million in IFCN’s COVID-19 efforts, adding the CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, in which approximately one hundred fact-checking organizations in more than 70 countries produced more than 11,000 COVID-19 fact-checks. pandemic in 2019. 40 languages”.
WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, also launched a US$500,000 grant programme to support seven fact-checking organisations’ projects fighting vaccine misinformation, in partnership with the IFCN, Meta’s statement notes.
“Meta, Google and others work on fake news a lot when there is a buzz around it and they are being questioned for the same,” claims Nayak.
“Once the buzz around them subsides, the attention paid to them begins to wane. “This is noticeable in emerging countries such as India, he says.
The lack of action to fight the news is related to low investment and a lack of resources, says Rafiq Copeland, senior advisor for platform accountability at Internews, a nonprofit media organization.
Global south countries are “certainly the largest markets in terms of users. But the advertising revenue that the companies receive per user is much higher in the US and Europe,” says Copeland.
Although most users of platforms like Facebook are located in Asia, Africa, the Middle East or Latin America, it says they “represent approximately a portion or less of the total profits raised through the company. ” the comparative investment made through language varies, he explains.
In 2021, most of Meta’s revenue was from the US (US$48.4 billion), followed by the European region, including Russia and Turkey (US$29 billion). The Asia-Pacific region generated US$26.7 billion, and African, Latin American and Middle Eastern companies made just US$10.6 billion.
More than 90% of Meta’s cash revenue in the second quarter of 2023 was generated through advertising, resulting in a profit of $31. 5 billion on total cash of $32 billion.
India is the world’s leading source of social media misinformation about COVID-19, according to a study by researchers at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh, published in 2021. With over 496 million people in the country on Meta platforms as of September 2023, there were only 11 third-party fact-checking partners in India addressing 16 languages together, in addition to English. The country has the largest number of third-party meta-fact-checkers.
Meanwhile, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, with a population of over 200 million people, has more than 500 indigenous languages and 31.60 million social media users – a majority of whom are active on Meta platforms. It was ranked 23rd on the social media misinformation list on COVID-19.
Here, Meta has three third-party fact-checkers (Dubai, Africa Check, and Associated Press News) tasked with debunking and verifying incorrect information in four languages in addition to English.
The production of fact-checks in local or lesser-spoken languages is an internal initiative of external partners. Meta, for example, lately has partners in 118 countries covering 90 languages.
According to Okpi and other fact-checkers interviewed via SciDev. Net, third-party fact-checking is still not effective in some languages. While misinformation in English can go viral, verifying it in a lesser-spoken language may not have been possible. the same scope, for example.
“A lot of what we’re doing now is verifying the data initially in English and then translating it into Hausa or Yoruba to make sure that the audience in that language can understand it,” says Kemi Busari, the magazine’s editor-in-chief. Nigerian Fact-Checking Organization Dubai.
“The goal is to go further.
“We want to do it in Igbo, Kanuri and Krio. We want to do three in Ghana and a couple of others before the end of this year.”
SciDev. Net found that Meta will pay at least $300 to $500 based on fact-checking.
But verifying hyperlocal and user-generated content, in lesser-spoken languages, is a bit more complicated and requires more resources to uncover the truth, says Bharath Guniganti, fact-checker at Hyderabad-based Factly. Bilingual and spousal platform that offers policies in Telugu and English.
Verification of classic claims, in English or in the dominant languages, can be done without problems because there is a virtual trail. However, locally produced user-generated content is more difficult to determine because it may require resources in the field, he says.
“We want more newsrooms as a component of the initiative, we want more focus, we want more voices [fact-checkers] in the communities, because the data we know evolves in other ways,” Busari adds.
Internews’ Copeland argues that platforms want to invest in language equality. And even this wants to be subsidized through “transparency and accountability to show that investments have been made,” he said.
Internews took a look at Meta’s Trusted Partner Program, another initiative aimed at preventing harm to Meta products and protecting users. This includes organizations and users alerting the company to harmful content, destructive trends, and other dangers online and even questioning Facebook and Instagram’s decisions. on behalf of at-risk users around the world.
In its 2023 report, Security at Stake: How to Save Meta’s Trusted Partner Program, Internews spotted several red flags, including understaffing, lack of resources, erratic and delayed responses to pressing threats posed through partners, and disparity of geographic bases.
“While Ukrainian partners can expect a reaction within 72 hours, in Ethiopia reports about the Tigray war would likely go unanswered for several months,” the report says.
Internews and Localization Labs published research into Google and Meta’s network policies in 4 other non-Western languages in January 2023. They found that the policies of both platforms involve “systemic errors and that English references were not applicable and lacked human scrutiny. “for its usability. ” and understanding. ” The research calls on Meta and Google “for their efforts to speak well with the growing number of users in non-English-speaking countries. “
Both report increased resources, transparency, and accountability.
Senior fact-checkers at BoomLive, one of the third-party fact-checkers working in Hindi, Bengali and English, noted in an email interview that incorrect information circulates faster in local or regional languages than in English. “Based on disinformation trends, a false claims related to a video, symbol, or audio are primarily generated in Hindi and then propagated to other languages,” they said.
Additionally, the topics of misinformation often reflect what is trending in the media, explained Guniganti of Factly. He added that most often it is dominated by political news or events, however COVID-19 was an outlier.
According to Meta, once an article is verified to be fake, the platform removes it but reduces the visibility of the content and informs the public to restrict the pervasiveness of this misinformation.
Social media corporations have taken two approaches to combating bad data, analysts say. The first is to block this type of content entirely, while the timing is to provide correct data along with content that contains false data.
Guniganti says, “Platforms only remove content with erroneous data that violates the network’s rules about harm itself, but content that provides false data because it constitutes a violation of the network’s rules. »
Busari agrees. Then they report false data to you [external partners] on Facebook or Instagram. And once you determine the facts, you can relay them to Facebook and they take action,” he says.
Sometimes the platforms reduce the spread of such false information, and sometimes the content is removed entirely.
When content is not deemed harmful or in violation of community guidelines, it is not removed by the platform. However, here, third-party fact-checkers rate the content for false information and Facebook provides alternative information alongside the fake content.
Nayak situations demanding this perception of damage. It states that individual content cannot be destructive or violate network guidelines, but that it is collected to cause genuine harm to society. It offers an example of how Islamophobic content has flourished during the pandemic, leading to genuine attacks on Muslims in India.
“There’s a video of a guy licking vegetables and fruits and it’s similar to the spread of the coronavirus,” he recalled. Although the video did not originate in India, it has gone viral on social media platforms, with messaging platforms such as WhatsApp being added.
People said, ‘Don’t buy anything from Muslims or eat anything they offer you,'” Nayak says.
Nayak produced a fact-check in Hinglish – a combination of Hindi and English – which went viral. But the damage was done.
“Even if you publish fake news, the prejudices they create will stay with you forever,” he says. “It helped anti-Muslim discourse flourish. “
“In India, COVID is unique in the sense that Muslims were blamed for the spread of COVID,” Nayak says. He sees COVID-19 as a turning point where social relations between Muslims and Hindus have been damaged.
For Nayak, actual damages are subjective. Additionally, content creators take advantage of news cycles just for clicks, further compounding the effect of fake news.
Even if it is assumed that incorrect information is shared through innocent users or that misinformation is created through those who intend to do harm, Copeland draws attention to a third category.
“There’s a broad category of destructive content that’s necessarily meant to cause harm, but only to drive engagement,” he says.
This is financial misinformation, where content creators visit your site to get clicks “and ultimately, through clicks, they visit your content to monetize it,” he says. These creators post about sensitive topics such as politics or politicized issues, adding fitness and weather.
“It’s an effective way to get clicks, and it can be very cost-effective,” Copeland says.
For example, an Islamic cleric in Nigeria – in the Hausa language on a YouTube video – claimed the coronavirus was a Western agenda of depopulation. Each video amassed over 45,000 views between 2021 and 2022 before being flagged in a report.
For a channel that monetizes its content, traffic and engagement benefits are estimated at up to $29 per 1,000 views. One social media content influencer, who wished to be identified, told SciDev. Net that “the race for cash is real. ” and that the maximum of creators will do anything to gain traction and earn income.
At one point, platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok had sought regional content moderators, but due to the disparity in salaries of local and foreign staff, in addition to other professional disagreements, the procedure failed, says FactsMatterNG’s Ajakaiye.
This, coupled with lax or non-existent regulations in the Global South, has given rise to many artificial media, such as faked videos or manipulated audio files, he says.
“It’s also anything they’re not considering,” Ajakaiye concludes. She says platforms are simply “overlooking” incorrect information in local languages, “believing it’s not vital and it’s not something they should be spending resources on. “
In a response to SciDev. Net, a YouTube spokesperson said the platform has transparent rules about misinformation, and added medical misinformation.
“In 2022, globally, we removed more than 140,000 videos for violating the vaccine provisions of our COVID-19 misinformation policy. These provisions came into force in October 2020,” he said.
He added that another bureaucracy of incorrect information is removed and that in the second quarter of 2023, YouTube removed more than 78,000 videos for violating those policies.
In 2021, the Full Fact platform, an independent fact-checking company, with a $2 million grant and expertise to build AI teams for fact-checking.
YouTube says the generation is now contributing to fact-checking efforts in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.
SciDev.Net also reached out to Meta, TikTok and Telegram for a statement but had not received a response by the time of publication.
As such, it’s unclear exactly how many resources those platforms have committed to countering disinformation in the lesser-spoken languages in Nigeria and India or in non-European languages, how many of those languages may stumble upon AI, or what would be classified as “real-world harm. “
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