2020年经济学人 Facebook和专制统治者(2)（在线收听）

Size is part of the problem. Facebook has 2.7bn users, many of whom write in foreign languages. Their posts are vetted for hate speech and incitement. But the firm’s 15,000 content moderators struggle to cope. Most do not know Arabic and its dialects. So the firm relies on automated filters, which make mistakes. They screen flagged words, but cannot detect cultural nuance or satire. Facebook rarely explains why it deletes content. “Despite a huge number of users in the global south, they are largely excluded from the conversation,” says Wafa Ben-Hassine, a Tunisian- American human-rights lawyer.

尺度是问题的一部分。Facebook拥有27亿用户，其中许多人用外语写作。他们的发布内容要经过审查是否为仇恨言论和煽动性言论。但该公司的15000名内容审核员却难以应对。大多数人不知道阿拉伯语及其方言。因此，该公司依靠自动过滤器，但会出错。他们屏蔽了标记的词语，但无法察觉文化的细微差别或讽刺。Facebook很少解释删除内容的原因。突尼斯裔美国人权律师瓦法·本·哈辛表示：“尽管南半球有大量用户，但他们基本上被排除在对话之外。”。

Facebook is bound by American law, which counts some key players in the Middle East as terrorists. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hizbullah, Hamas and a raft of other armed Islamist groups are banned. Occasionally American media outlets give members of these groups airtime, but Facebook has a rigid interpretation of the law against aiding and abetting terrorists. More troubling is how it bans people sympathetic to these groups—or removes content that simply refers to them. Even Hizbullah’s opponents spell the militia’s name with a space between each letter to prevent Facebook deleting their posts.

Facebook受到美国法律的约束，美国法律将中东地区的一些主要参与者视为恐怖分子。伊朗伊斯兰革命卫队、真主党、哈马斯和其他一些伊斯兰武装组织被禁止入境。美国媒体偶尔会给这些组织的成员提供广播时间，但Facebook对禁止援助和教唆恐怖分子的法律有严格的解释。更麻烦的是，它会禁止人们发表同情这些团体的言论，或者删除涉及这些团体的内容。甚至真主党的反对者也会在每个字母之间加上空格，以防止Facebook删除他们的帖子。