Facebook staff to learn Sinhala insults after Sri Lanka riots

AFP: Three months after Sri Lanka was rocked by deadly anti-Muslim riots fuelled by online vitriol, Facebook is training its staff to identify inflammatory content in the country’s local languages. 

The social network has been seeking penance in Sri Lanka after authorities blocked Facebook in March as incendiary posts by Buddhist hardliners fanned religious violence that left three people dead and reduced hundreds of mosques, homes and businesses to ashes. 

Until the week-long ban, appeals to Facebook to act against the contagion of hate speech had been met with deafening silence, at a time when the California-based tech giant was reeling from unprecedented global scrutiny over fake news and user privacy. 

“We did make mistakes and we were slow,” Facebook spokeswoman Amrit Ahuja told AFP in Colombo. 

The dearth of staff fluent in Sinhala – the language spoken by Sri Lanka’s largest ethnic group – compounded the issue, with government officials and activists saying the oversight allowed extremist content to flourish undetected on the platform. 

Ahuja said Facebook was committed to hiring more Sinhala speakers but declined to say how many were currently employed in Sri Lanka. 

“This is the problem we are trying to address with Facebook. They need more Sinhala resources,” said the island’s telecommunications minister Harin Fernando. 

Since the violence broke out in March, two high-level delegations from the company have visited Sri Lanka, where ethnic divisions linger after decades of war, to assure the Government of its intent. 

Ahuja said Facebook was working with civil society organisations to familiarise its staff with Sinhala slurs and racist epithets. 

Complex local nuances have added to the challenge. The word for “brother” in Tamil – also an official language in the country – can be a derogatory term in Sinhala when a slight inflection is used. 

Desperate measures

Fernando said the decision to impose an island-wide blackout on Facebook – used by one in three Sri Lankans – was taken as a last resort to prevent an escalation of violence. 

Buddhist monks freely shared images of masked men attacking mosques and urged others to do the same in the weeks before the riots erupted in Kandy. 

Sinhala extremists used the social network to recruit rioters and organise their travel to the troubled area, from where violence later spread. 

A meme in Sinhala, which remained online for weeks, urged death to all Muslims, including children.  A man who reported it to Facebook was told it did not violate “specific community standards”. 

In addition to government warnings, Fernando told AFP that Facebook users lodged thousands of complaints over extremist content, but were met with silence. 

“It was not something that I liked doing. But if we didn’t block Facebook, the violence would have spread out of control,” he said. 

Eventually the army was given special powers to restore order under the first state of emergency declared in the 21-million-strong nation since the end of the civil war in 2009. 

‘Action needed’

Ahuja said Facebook has since taken down “hate figures and organisations” in Sri Lanka including the Bodu Bala Sena, a radical Buddhist outfit that is blamed for attacks against Muslims in recent years. 

Its spokesman Dilantha Withanage complained the group and its leader – the notorious extremist monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara – were being unfairly targeted. 

“We can’t even post a photo of venerable Gnanasara on Facebook,” Withanage told AFP. 

But videos of his sermons can still be seen on the social network. Other extremists have also slipped through the cracks, activists say, despite repeated requests to have their accounts removed. 

Last year another extremist Buddhist group, Sinhale Jathika Balamuluwa, urged followers via Facebook Live to storm a UN compound sheltering Rohingya Muslims. Police had to be called in to protect the refugees from the mob. 

Several Facebook pages for the group have been blocked in Sri Lanka but the same content can be viewed under alternate names, activists say. 

“Facebook is only now being held to account over things that since 2013 were evident...(to) us,” said Sanjana Hattotuwa, a researcher who has studied Islamophobia on Facebook in Sri Lanka. 

Sri Lanka’s Centre for Policy Alternatives said Facebook needed to offer more than “cookie cutter” pledges to clean up its act. 

“The time for promises has passed. Action is what’s needed, and transparency and accountability,” said Hattotuwa.

Facebook used less for news as youngsters turn to WhatsApp: Reuters Institute

LONDON (Reuters): The use of social media networks such as Facebook to consume news has started to fall in the United States as many young people turn toward messaging apps such as Facebook-owned WhatsApp to discuss events, the Reuters Institute found.

Usage of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, for news is down nine percentage points from 2017 in the United States and down 20 points for younger audiences, according to the Reuters Institute survey of 74,000 people in 37 markets.

“The use of social media for news has started to fall in a number of key markets after years of continuous growth,” Nic Newman, research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, said in the Digital News Report.

“We continue to see a rise in the use of messaging apps for news as consumers look for more private (and less confrontational) spaces to communicate,” Newman said.

The research lays bare the volatility of consumer tastes as the news industry tries to grapple with the impact of the internet and smartphones that have transformed both the way people consume news and the way media companies make money.

The YouGov polling for the Reuters Institute was conducted mostly before Facebook, facing criticism for algorithms that may have prioritised misleading news, adjusted the filters on its News Feed in January.

Facebook and Twitter are still used by many users to discover news but the discussion then takes place on messaging apps such as WhatsApp, often because people feel less vulnerable discussing events on such apps.

“Social media is like wearing a mask,” an unidentified UK female respondent from the 30-45 age group was quoted as saying. “When I am in my messaging groups with my friends, the mask comes off and I feel like I can truly be myself.”

WhatsApp, founded in 2009 and bought by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion in cash and stock, is more popular than Twitter in importance for news in many countries, the report said.

Some respondents still found news on Facebook but then posted items on a WhatsApp group for discussion with a closer set of friends.

WhatsApp and Instagram, also a unit of Facebook, have taken off in Latin America and Asia while Snapchat has made progress in Europe and the United States, the survey noted of regional news sharing differences.

Fewer than half of people surveyed across the world said they trusted the media most of the time, though in the United States just 34% said they trusted most news, most of the time, down 4 points.

In the United States, local television news and the Wall Street Journal were the most trusted news brands while in the United Kingdom it was BBC news and ITV news.

Fox News and Breitbart were trusted more by those on the right of the political spectrum in the United States while those on the left trusted CNN more.

News brands with a broadcasting background and a long heritage tended to be trusted most, with popular newspapers and digital-born brands trusted less. Public broadcasters scored well.

The so called “Trump Bump” increase in subscriptions to news media has been maintained though more than two-thirds of respondents were unaware of problems in the news industry and thought most media were making a profit from digital news.

“The verdict is clear: people find that some news is worth paying for, but much of it is not,” said Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of research at the Reuters Institute.

“The challenge for publishers now is to ensure that the journalism they produce is truly distinct, relevant and valuable, and then effectively promoting it to convince people to donate or subscribe.”

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is a research center at the University of Oxford that tracks media trends. Thomson Reuters Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Thomson Reuters, funds the Reuters Institute.