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Communalism

Before Assam Elections, Facebook Was Warned of Inflammatory Content But Lacked Key Hate Speech Tool

Leaked internal documents show how the company only started studying the issue in 2020, based on research that detailed the problems of Hindutva and Assamese nationalism.

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New Delhi: In public announcements and testimonies to governments, Facebook regularly boasts of how the overwhelming majority of hate speech on its platform is taken down by automated systems.

“97% of hate speech taken down from Facebook was spotted by our automated systems before any human flagged it, up from 94% in the previous quarter and 80.5% in late 2019,” the company said last year.

What the company is silent about is that the company’s AI tools simply don’t do much for different languages around the world, mostly due to a lack of what it calls ‘hate-speech classifiers’ for local languages.

Leaked internal corporate documents reviewed by The Wire show how Facebook’s staffers and outside researchers flagged the lack of a hate speech classifier in the Assamese language multiple times in the run-up to the 2021 assembly elections in the north-eastern state.

Furthermore, documents show the company started work on developing a “demotion” process for key hate words in Assamese only in 2020.

These disclosures come from documents submitted to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and provided to the US Congress in redacted form by the legal counsel of Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower.

The redacted versions of the internal research received by the US Congress have been reviewed by The Wire as part of a consortium of global news organisations.

The Wire has learned that for problematic content in the Assamese language, Facebook depends only on in-house and contracted staffers that review it, as well as external fact-checkers.

Lack of tool, and internal process

The concerns of hate speech in Assamese language was flagged internally after a presentation was made on February 8, 2020 to Facebook by a group of external researchers.

As per documents from those disclosures, the outside research team, through its local staff, had provided Facebook “qualitative, on the ground insights into what’s happening offline and how it is affected by Facebook and vice versa”. The research was carried out “on the shifting political landscape in Assam” as preparations were underway for the 2021 assembly elections.

Internal Facebook communications particularly underlined that the outside researchers had compiled two Assamese keywords and two Assamese Facebook groups/pages as the “beginnings of a seed-set to be used to surface inflammatory content from Assam”.

While one of the two Assamese words mentioned in the document is “Geda“, identified in the disclosures as “an Assamese word used to describe Bengali-speaking Muslims pejoratively”, the other one is “Bongal”, qualified as “an Assamese word used to describe Bengali-speaking people pejoratively”.

Though Hemkosh, the first Assamese etymological dictionary based on Sanskrit spellings compiled by Hemchandra Barua in 1900, doesn’t feature the word Geda, the meaning of Bongal is described by it in Assamese as “bongo dexor itor manuh” and in English as “a lower class Bengali”.

The British invaders were also referred to in earlier times as “Bonga Bongal” or “white lowly outsiders” by the native population. Several communities in the Northeast had traditionally used words in vernacular languages/dialects to identify outsiders or invaders. Over time though, particularly in the electorally charged identity-based politics of today, those words have also been employed by a section of people against those whom they view as ‘outsiders’, even though in independent India all are citizens are equal.

As per a 2019 news report, Abu Eusuf Mohammad Raihan Uddin, one of the admins of a Facebook page ‘Chalo Paltai’, had used the term Geda to state, “They (the Assamese) are calling us Bengali-origin Muslims, Bangladeshis, Geda (originally meaning a guy, now used as derogatory term for Muslim Bengalis) and we have to bear all these humiliating tags…”

Raihan Uddin made these remarks during an open debate held at the Guwahati Press Club on June 30, where on the other side was a literary group from the Bengali-speaking Muslim community opposed to the Chalo Paltai group. The Chalo Paltai which has been pushing for Bengali-origin Muslims to declare Bengali as their mother tongue in the next Census, instead of Assamese.

The majority of the Bengali-origin Muslims in Assam identify Assamese as their mother tongue in Census reports. This is a contributing factor for Assamese language speakers in the state to be officially in the majority.

As per the redacted documents, Facebook’s internal research also mentions the Chalo Paltai Facebook campaign and says that a section of people looked at it as an attempt by Bengali Hindus to make Assam a “Bengali majority state”.

While the Chalo Paltai Facebook page didn’t make it to the suggested list of groups/pages internally which form part of Facebook’s seed-list to flag inflammatory content in Assam, those that do are ‘Assamese Online’ and ‘Jatir Xonkot Kalot Dr. Himanta Biswa Sarma’, a fan page dedicated to the chief minister.

While the disclosures highlighted that even the Assam Police had asked Facebook to take down the Assamese Online page for “its hate-mongering content”, the documents stated that the page, “notorious for spreading hate speech against Bengali-speaking people and other minorities”, also featured some posts that instructed followers to take violent action against Bengali speakers. It particularly highlighted a post from January 21, 2020 where there was mention of a “Hindu Bangladeshi village among every Bodo village” in the Bodo Territorial Region of Assam.

According to external researchers hired by Facebook, posts on the chief minister’s fan page on Facebook “are often inciting and hate-mongering, and users sometimes post hateful content to the group to get more reach”.

A cursory look at the Assamese Online shows it has 97,000 followers presently. The Wire could not trace the chief minister’s fan page mentioned in the disclosures.

Citing the two keywords and the two pages, Facebook’s internal communications had stated that though such inflammatory content would fall under the new “ARC borderline hate and V & I demotion policy” of the platform, still, keeping in mind “the high risk of communal violence during the Assamese election”, it would recommend “a stronger time-bound demotion of inflammatory content that includes accusations of harm (but especially threats to the status of Assamese) should be considered”.

Lurinjyoti Gogoi. Photo: Twitter/Lurinjyoti Gogoi

The disclosures also highlighted a particular speech by Lurinjyoti Gogoi, former All Assam Students Union leader and now the president of new anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act party Asom Jatiya Parishad (AJP), during an interview to Assamese channel DY365, as an example of his “fear-mongering attacks against Bengali-speakers in Assam”.

Gogoi’s statement, made during the January 29, 2020 episode of the channel’s programme 24 Ghanta anchored by journalist Atanu Bhuyan, was flagged for the claim that “19 million Hindu Bangladeshis would enter and settle in Assam” due to the CAA, and “would become an important voting bloc in every constituency and that ‘Bangladeshis’ would grab land from indigenous people.”

The documents seen by The Wire said that the “statement about 19 million new Hindu Bangladeshis circulated during the CAA protests in 2019. During the protests, Assamese were advised to take up sharp objects to kill Hindu Bangladeshis.” It added, “There was a rumour circulated via Whatsapp and SMS that the BJP government was bringing truck full of Bangladeshis to Assam.”

The documents provided to the US Congress highlighted, “when asked who the most vulnerable target of inflammatory content is, local researchers responded, ‘Bengali-speaking Muslims face the worst of it in Assam”.

It said, “Powerful BJP members in Assam, like Himanta Biswa Sarma, have trafficked in inflammatory rumours that Muslims are pursuing ‘biological attacks’ against Assamese people by chemical fertilizers to produce liver, kidney and heart diseases in Assamese.”

The Bengali-origin Muslims form a large gamut of vegetable farmers in Assam. The community is often referred to as Miya (Miyah), which some also term as derogatory. Facebook’s internal documents, while noting that the term has become one of disrespect, however stated, “While we have to be attentive to it, one should also be mindful that such words can be a part of affirmative political projects that should not be diminished by dictionary based content moderation system.” The disclosures also show a mention of the controversy around writing poems in dialects spoken by the community, termed as Miyah poetry.

In an exhaustive backgrounder provided by the researchers on the “regional/linguistic and religion divisions and conflict” in Assam, the researchers had also stated, “The conflict in Assam is more language-based – Assamese vs. Bengali – than religion-based (Hindus vs. Muslims); however, anti-Bengali Muslim sentiment is intense in Assam and this has been the case for decades.”

Such conclusions were drawn from interviews and two workshops conducted in the state which included people from the state’s tribal communities. One finding from the research showed that in Assam, hate speech targeting men tends to fall along community i.e group lines, “while women often are targeted directly as individuals with hate speech, harassment and threats to sexual violence”.

BJP and Borah

Satya Ranjan Borah. Photo: Twitter/Satya Ranjan Borah

Yet another name flagged by external researchers to Facebook as a “prominent source of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Assam” was Satya Ranjan Borah, affiliated to the ruling BJP.

As per the documents, “His social media content is a good example of how wider Hindu nationalist narratives are being localized in Assam, such as claims of Islamic jihad against Hindus and calls for cow protection.”

In October 2020, Borah was in the news for blocking the gate of the Guwahati Zoo along with his supporters to protest against beef being fed to tigers. He is periodically in the local news for hate-mongering speeches against Muslims, and FIRs have also been filed against him for such acts.

Borah’s Facebook page has 116,000 followers at present.

Facebook response

In response to a questionnaire sent by The Wire, a Meta (Facebook’s new name) spokesperson noted that the company was “closely tracking” many of the possible risks associated with the elections in Assam this year.

“We proactively put in place a number of emergency measures to reduce the virality of inflammatory content, particularly in videos. Videos featuring inflammatory content were identified as high risk during the election, and we implemented a measure to help prevent these videos from automatically playing in someone’s video feed,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“In addition, we reduce the distribution of content that likely violates our policies on hate speech or incitement of violence while our teams investigate it. Once we confirm that the content violates these policies, we remove it. We also significantly reduce the distribution of content posted from accounts that have repeatedly posted violating content — in addition to our standard practice of removing accounts that frequently violate our Community Standards.”