Facebook Allegedly Failed to Police Hate Speech Content That Contributed to Ethnic Violence in Ethiopia

June 22, 2019

Allegations suggest Facebook failed to effectively manage hate speech, some of which was violent and dehumanizing, on its platform, potentially contributing to the ethnic violence faced by communities in Ethiopia. The need for responsible AI governance and trustworthy AI practices cannot be overstated, especially in situations where AI can impact human safety.

Learn more about how HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) aims to prevent such incidents and promote harm prevention through guardrails for AI.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.644, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.633, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 4.1 — similarity 0.628, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: meta, facebook
Alleged developer: meta, facebook
Alleged harmed parties: tigrinya-speaking-facebook-users, facebook-users-in-ethiopia, ethiopian-public, afaan-oromo-speaking-facebook-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/471

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.