Facebook’s failure to pay attention to non-English languages is allowing hate speech to flourish

MELBOURNE: We and our team are the first Australian social scientists to receive funding through Facebook’s content policy research awards, which we used to investigate hate speech on LGBTQI+ community pages in five Asian countries: India, Myanmar, Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia.

We looked at three aspects of hate speech regulation in the Asia Pacific region over 18 months. First, we mapped hate speech law in our case study countries, to understand how this problem might be legally countered. We also looked at whether Facebook’s definition of “hate speech” included all recognised forms and contexts for this troubling behaviour.