On Thursday, however, Global Witness said it did receive a response earlier in July but it was lost in a spam folder. Global Witness said it reached out to Meta after its ads were accepted for publication but did not receive a response. But the fact that they easily could have been shows that despite repeated assurances that it would do better, Facebook parent Meta still appears to regularly fail to detect hate speech and calls for violence on its platform. “We were surprised to see that our ads had for the first time been flagged, but they hadn't been flagged for the much more important reasons that we expected them to be,” said Nienke Palstra, senior campaigner at London-based Global Witness. Once the profanities were removed and grammar errors fixed, however, the ads - still calling for killings and containing obvious hate speech - went through without a hitch. The Swahili language ads easily made it through Facebook's detection systems and were approved for publication.Īs for the English ads, some were rejected at first, but only because they contained profanities and mistakes in addition to hate speech.

Some also included profanity and grammatical errors. They compared people to donkeys and goats. The ads, which the groups submitted both in English and in Swahili, spoke of beheadings, rape and bloodshed. It is the third such test of Facebook's ability to detect hateful language - either via artificial intelligence or human moderators - that the groups have run, and that the company has failed. Facebook is letting violent hate speech slip through its controls in Kenya as it has in other countries, according to a new report from the nonprofit groups Global Witness and Foxglove.

H and m ad fail