Who should set the Standards? Analysing Censored Arabic Content on Facebook during the Palestine-Israel Conflict

Walid Magdy, Hamdy Mubarak, Joni Salminen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Nascent research on human-computer interaction concerns itself with fairness of content moderation systems. Designing globally applicable content moderation systems requires considering historical, cultural, and socio-technical factors. Inspired by this line of work, we investigate Arab users' perception of Facebook's moderation practices. We collect a set of 448 deleted Arabic posts, and we ask Arab annotators to evaluate these posts based on (a) Facebook Community Standards (FBCS) and (b) their personal opinion. Each post was judged by 10 annotators to account for subjectivity. Our analysis shows a clear gap between the Arabs' understanding of the FBCS and how Facebook implements these standards. The study highlights a need for discussion on the moderation guidelines on social media platforms about who decides the moderation guidelines, how these guidelines are interpreted, and how well they represent the views of marginalised user communities.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCHI 2025 - Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9798400713941
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Apr 2025
Event2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2025 - Yokohama, Japan
Duration: 26 Apr 20251 May 2025

Publication series

NameConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Conference

Conference2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2025
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityYokohama
Period26/04/251/05/25

Keywords

  • Censorship
  • Content Moderation
  • Facebook
  • Free Speech
  • Palestine Israel Conflict
  • Social Media

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Who should set the Standards? Analysing Censored Arabic Content on Facebook during the Palestine-Israel Conflict'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this