Facebook auto filter in just 4 Indian languages

Hyderabad: Between July and September 2019, Facebook removed as many as 7 million posts that contained “hate speech” across the world. More than 80 per cent of these posts were detected not by human users but by computer algorithms designed for this purpose. In the past couple of years, social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter have been relying on artificial intelligence to detect hate speech. However, for a country such as India, with all its diversity, the system is far from perfect.

Facebook, in an interview to Time magazine in November 2019, confirmed that it had automatic hate speech detection systems in place only for four Indian languages: Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and Tamil. Across the world, such systems are active in around 40 languages. Other Indian languages, the users of which number in crores, are out of the systems’ purview.