Meta has apologised after inserting the word “terrorist” into the profile bios of some Palestinian Instagram users, in what the company says was a bug in auto-translation.
When auto-translated to English the phrase read: “Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.”
TikTok user YtKingKhan posted earlier this week about the issue, noting that different combinations still translated to “terrorist”.
Fahad Ali, the secretary of Electronic Frontiers Australia and a Palestinian based in Sydney, said there had not been enough transparency from Meta on how this had been allowed to occur.
Meta also said there was a global outage of its live video service on Facebook for a short time.
“Often Meta will say that these are the consequence of issues with automated moderation, but it seems increasingly that Palestinian voices are the ones getting caught up in this.”
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