July 31, 2022 | Washington Post
AI falling short in moderating extremist content on Facebook
ISD’s Executive Director for Asia, the Middle East and Africa, Moustafa Ayad, spoke to the Washington Post about the problem of extremist and terrorist content on Facebook in Kenya.
Referring to ISD’s report Under-Moderated, Unhinged and Ubiquitous: Al-Shabaab and the Islamic State Networks on Facebook on content thriving and persisting on Meta’s platform, Moustafa told the Post that Facebook’s reliance on AI for moderation is a core problem. What’s more, is bad actors have learned how to game the system. Moustafa also spoke to POLITICO about this issue, highlighted by the Facebook Papers, in October 2021.
While most of the accounts flagged by ISD’s report have since been removed, similar content has been removed, highlighting the whack-a-mole nature of a moderation strategy that is inconsistently enforced and insufficient to deal with whole systems of problematic content. In response to our report, Amnesty International released a statement expressing “deep concern” over the platform’s failure to stop terrorist content online.
