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Comment by josh_fyi | Hacker News Reader

Why does it say in an article about Arabic, "In Afghanistan, where hate speech is reportedly one of the top 'abuse categories.'..."

Arabic is not spoke in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, there is common ignorant generalization that Arabic is the language of Iran, Afghanistan, and other Muslim countries.

To those who live there, the distinction is not insignificant.

This also casts doubt on the veracity of everything else in this article.

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A charitable interpretation would be to understand the "arabic" as in "The arabic script", that is: the alphabet. This is indeed the written representation of Persian and Urdu.

It's a common confusion for some people to conflate a natural language with it's script. Compare with the similar confusion that conflates a programming language with either it's implementation or the snytax used to write it in text files.

It’s not a common confusion at all though. No one would ever confuse Italian for English because they use the same script. It’s only “common” wrt Arabic script languages.

I imagine eastern cultures would find Italian and English rather similar.

Pashto, Dari, Italian, and English are all Indo-European languages. Arabic is not. In other words Afghan languages are closer to English than they are to Arabic.

You're conflating two fundamentally different notions of similarity. The similarity among the Indo-European languages are extremely deep linguistic and structural similarities only appreciated by people who study languages and their history for a living, and known by people who are interested in languages and read about them.

The similarity between same-script languages is a superficial geometric symmetry that can be seen by anyone with functioning eyes. Most people are in the second category while not being in the first.

"Facebook is bad at moderating the Latin alphabet. For the Arabic script, it’s a disaster."

Only if you already know Italian or English. Personally I would easily confuse Italian with Spanish or Portuguese.

I think your familiarity with the Latin script is coloring your perceptions a bit, I'm an arab and when I was a child I used to classify French, Italian and all languages that use Latin letters as 'English'. Growing up is not what made me realize this is wrong, it's learning English. It's very easy to imagine the other way around.

> I was a child I used to classify French, Italian and all languages that use Latin letters as 'English'.

These three have a lot of words in common. French-English share something like 30% of their respective vocabulary on top of an other 30% they both inherited from Latin. So, you were almost right!

If you are going to write about a topic, perhaps you should have a better understanding of it and its related issues than a child would.

By this logic Chinese, Japanese, Classical Vietnamese and Classical Korean are all sorta kinda just Chinese.

Aside from being amazingly ignorant ( it can be argued Chinese dialects alone are more diverse than Romance languages) your not going to be able to have a Cantonese speaker moderate a Japanese forum.

That said, why are we realistically expecting Facebook to be able to do all this. The moderation should really occur in your head, if you're reading really hateful things online, maybe stop reading them. It turns into an endless game of whack-a-mole.

There are tons of Reddit threads I've been in where I felt I was being personally attacked, or reading pure hate speech. I stopped using Reddit because it wasn't good for me. To be completely fair to Facebook it's not even possible to moderate their platform to the extent this article imagines.

I think a fair compromise would be to allow Nations to ban or heavily restrict Facebook. And Facebook should comply with that. Hell, a Facebook timeout for all of humanity wouldn't be a bad idea.

Maybe given the week of an election just shut the whole thing down aside from messenger.

Nations can already ban usage of Facebook if they want to. We don't need to "allow" anything. But that kind of censorship takes us down a dangerous path. It would be horrible to see the rest of the world turn into China.

I'd disagree in part and say that, when these languages were all used a few hundred years ago, there may be a way a traveller can communicate with locals if they travelled between the regions (with literacy).

But I would agree that they wouldn't be able to use it to their advantage (moderation).

Now? Well, now the classical languages aren't used or learnt.

What the hell are you saying? Is it "the existence of state censorship is a good countermeasure to online speech when applied at the platform level"? Because that would be sneaking some pretty authoritarian shit into your opinions. I want facebook to go away too but unilateral action on the part of states isn't going to do it (no matter how influential you might want China to be). Now, some kind of international coalition to support fact based information via sanctions (otherwise you trade one kind of propaganda to another) might help.. guessing big red not into that idea tho.

And I suspect that Facebook's moderation problems extend to most, if not all, languages written in Arabic script. If they can't even handle languages like Spanish or French correctly (cf. other top-level comments), the chances that they'll handle languages which are more "obscure" (from a Western perspective) are basically zero.

Some language nerdiness: Persian (Farsi), and main languages of Afghanistan (Pashto and Tajik) are all indo-european, so the same language family as Indian Subcontinent and (most) European languages.

Arabic is from a whole different family tree of Semitic languages, which also includes Hebrew and Maltese (go figure). They are totally different to indo-european languages.

>...family tree of Semitic languages, which also includes...Maltese

Okay. I did NOT see that one coming. In retrospect they're not exactly far from other Arabic-speaking countries, but I'm curious what the history is. I've also heard that Sicilian retains some features that differentiates it from Italian and suggests different roots, so I wonder if there's a connection there with Maltese.

Malta was conquered by North African Islamic caliphate around ~800AD, and then 200 years later the Normans(yes, those normans weren't just invading England around the year 1000) came in and took it, and then 200 years after that they kicked the Muslims out. By that point the Arabic that the original invaders brought was the common language, and it developed independently from the Arabic spoken in North Africa, slowly becoming latinized by the Christian Normans.

Gotcha, so it does parallel Sicily pretty closely but I don't think Arabic took hold as a common language quite how it did in Malta, but this is definitely something I need to look into more deeply. Thanks!

That's exactly right...the Arabs also invaded sicily around the same time, but didn't get as much as a foothold as they did on Malta...maybe just because of population sizes, or the fact that mainland Italy down by current day calabria were also speaking the same language as the Sicilians, so there was a reserve for the language to continue on. So Sicilian (the language) has a lot of borrowing from Arabic (as well as greek) instead of being a dialect of arabic.

That's fascinating, thanks for the insight.

There are large Arab communities in the north near Kunduz. Not all of them have retained their ancestral language but some have.

Arabic is a lingua franca across the Islamic world. Even in Indonesia, they study the Koran in Arabic, they discuss religion in Arabic. Are you quite sure about the conclusions you're jumping to?

Follow the link to the WSJ article in the text you've quoted. [0] You'll see a similar conflation of "issues with automated Arabic moderation" and "Afghanistan".

In context, though, it appears to be less a confusion about which language is spoken there and more a narrative lift from the WSJ article. Said article's structure places more emphasis on the facticity of Facebook's AI-based moderation, which only successfully classifies and removes an estimate of 2% of viewed hate speech in any language, then introduces Afghanistan's lower rate as an (imperfect and frankly kinda silly) example of Facebook deprioritizing other languages' AI moderation.

[0] https://archive.md/6WXq4 due to paywall

Welcome to the black-pilled media distrust group. Most of the time it's ignorance. Sometimes it's outright lies.

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