9/24/21, 8:16 PM Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar Making matters worse, the company’s operation for monitoring content in Burmese was meagre. In 2014, the social media behemoth had just one content reviewer who spoke Burmese: a local contractor in Dublin, according to messages sent by Facebook employees in the private Facebook chat group. A second Burmese speaker began working in early 2015, the messages show. In Manila – the original site of the outsourced Project Honey Badger – there were no content reviewers who spoke Burmese. People who reviewed Myanmar content there spoke English. “In cases like hate speech where we didn’t understand the language, we would say, ‘I don’t know the language,’” said a person who worked there. “So the client had to solve that,” the person said, referring to Facebook. By 2015, Facebook had around four Burmese speakers reviewing Myanmar content in Manila and Dublin. They were stretched thin: that year Facebook had 7.3 million active users in Myanmar.  FACING SCRUTINY: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, seen testifying here on Capitol Hill in April, was quizzed over Facebook’s failure to stem hate speech on its platform in Myanmar. For years, the social media giant invested scant resources in combating hate speech in the country. REUTERS/Leah Millis Accenture slowly began to hire more Burmese speakers. With the help of volunteer translators, Facebook also introduced a Burmese-language interface. By 2016, the Honey Badger project had moved to Kuala Lumpur after Accenture convinced Facebook it would be easier to recruit Burmese and others to work in Malaysia’s capital than in further-off Manila, according to a person familiar with the matter. In an office tower in Kuala Lumpur, teams of content monitors are assigned to handle different Asian countries, not just Myanmar. They are paid around $850 to $1000 a month and are often employed by temporary staffing agencies, according to exemployees and online recruitment ads. Facebook said in a statement: “We've chosen to work only with highly reputable, global partners that take care of their employees, pay them well and provide robust benefits - this includes Accenture in Asia Pacific.” A spokesperson for Accenture confirmed it partners with Facebook. “The characterization of our operations as ‘secretive’ is misleading and confidentiality is in place primarily to protect the privacy and security of our people and the clients we serve,” the spokesperson said. The communications man Former content monitors said they often each had to make judgments on 1,000 or more potentially problematic content items a day, although the number is now understood to be less. Facebook’s complete rules about what is and isn’t allowed on its platform are spelled out in its internal community standards enforcement guidelines, which the company made public for the first time in April. It defines hate speech as “violent or dehumanising speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation” against people based on their race, ethnicity, religious affiliation and other characteristics. In response, Facebook said: “Content reviewers aren’t required to evaluate any set number of posts … We encourage reviewers to take the time they need.” A Facebook official also told Reuters the community standards policy is global, “but there are local nuances,” such as slurs, that content reviewers who are native speakers can consider when making decisions. But former content monitors told Reuters the rules were inconsistent; sometimes they could make exceptions and sometimes they couldn’t. Former content monitors also said they were trained to err on the side of keeping content on Facebook. “Most of the time, you try to give the user the benefit of the doubt,” said one former Facebook employee. The ex-monitors said they sometimes had as little as a few seconds to decide if a post constituted hate speech or violated Facebook’s community standards in some other way. They said they didn’t actually search for hate speech themselves; instead, they reviewed a giant queue of posts mostly reported by Facebook users. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-facebook-hate/ 9/13