Friend,

Free Press spent the past couple of months working with a producer at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver to help shape this week’s segment on how online platforms do very little to combat disinformation in languages other than English. And thanks to whistleblower Frances Haugen, we now know that 86% of spending to combat disinformation on Facebook is spent on English-language content — even though only 9% of the platform’s users speak English.

Big Tech owes us big answers: Urge Facebook, Nextdoor, Twitter and YouTube to come clean about how they're addressing — or failing to address — the rise of non-English disinformation.

Thanks!

Rose

Friend,

Disinformation and hate about COVID-19, our democracy and each other continues to spread across social-media platforms — while companies continue to profit. Without any transparency and accountability, companies like Facebook will continue to boost deceitful and hateful content because it gets the most clicks and views around the world. Demand real transparency from Facebook, Nextdoor, Twitter and YouTube about how they moderate languages other than English.

Disinformation is bad enough in English, Friend, but it’s even worse in non-English languages, particularly Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. In fact, thanks to the bravery of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, we now know that 86% of spending to combat disinformation on Facebook is spent on English-language content — even though only 9% of the platform’s users speak English.

There’s a clear disparity between how platforms moderate English content and how they moderate non-English content. That’s why we’re demanding real transparency and accountability about Big Tech’s content-moderation practices in non-English languages.

Facebook and Twitter tout their transparency centers, but the companies offer no data on their non-English-language content moderation.

YouTube has a community-guidelines enforcement hub that promotes how it and owner Google disrupt the spread of English-language disinformation but the hub has no data on disinformation in other languages. Nextdoor proudly promotes its “inclusive moderation policies” — but it isn’t transparent about how these policies actually work.

Demand that Facebook, Nextdoor, Twitter and YouTube provide real transparency about their non-English-language content-moderation practices — because Big Tech owes us big answers.

Thanks for all that you do —

Rose and the rest of the Free Press Action team
freepress.net

P.S. Did you know that disinformation and hate in non-English languages is less likely to be removed from a platform than content in English? There’s a clear disparity between how companies like Facebook moderate English content and how they moderate non-English content. Join the fight: Call for more transparency from Big Tech about their non-English-language content-moderation practices.