Kenya’s ethnic watchdog, National Cohesion And Integration Commission (NCIC) has issued a warning to Facebook to stop the hate speech on its platform within seven days, or risk a ban, as the country is set to go into election next month.
The NCIC reacted to a report by advocacy group Global Witness, and Foxglove, a legal non-profit firm, which fingered Facebook’s inability to detect hate speech ads. A report which was a collaboration of the Global Witness report and that of NCIC findings, reveals that Facebook was slow to prevent hateful content on its platform, fanning an already volatile political environment.
The NCIC has therefore called on Meta, Facebook’s parent company, on moderation before, during, and after the elections, while giving it one week to comply or risk a ban in the country.
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According to the NCIC commissioner, Danvas Makori, he disclosed that Facebook continuously violates the laws of the country as they have on several occasion allowed themselves to be a vector of hate speech, incitement, misinformation, and disinformation.
Facebook is said to have a penetration of 82% in Kenya, making it the second most widely used social network in the country, after Whatsapp.
In a response to Kenya’s threat, Facebook has issued a statement, stating that it has been preparing for the country’s 2022 election over the past year, with the help of a dedicated team that is working closely with election authorities and trusted partners in the country.
Facebook has always praised its super efficient AI models for being able to detect hate speech from being circulated on the platform. However, there have been complaints from different countries.
To test Facebook’s claims that its Al models can detect hate speech, Global witness submitted a total of 20 ads that called for violence and beheadings both in English and Swahili. All except one wasn’t approved. The algorithms Facebook currently uses to detect hate speech works only in certain languages.
What this implies is that, with this defect, it has become easy for Facebook to contain the spread of racial and religious hate speeches online in primarily developed countries and communities where global languages like English, Spanish, and Mandarin dominate. But in the rest of the world, it is as difficult as ever.
Unlike the algorithms that Facebook states that automatically detect 80% of hate speeches without the need of a user to report their first, these human moderators do not regularly scan the site for the hate speech themselves. Instead, their job is to decide whether posts that users have already reported should be removed.