FB ups investments to curb hate speech in Sri Lanka

Colombo, July 11 (IANS) Facebook has significantly increased its investments to ramp up Sinhala and Tamil language expertise targeting to curb hate speech and other harmful contents originating from Sri Lanka on the social media platform.

"We have invested heavily on Sinhala and Tamil language expertises as we have promised. We significantly ramped up our language expertise in Sri Lanka through hiring more experts," a Facebook spokesperson told the media here on Wednesday.

He noted that their public policy team members in Sri Lanka have worked closely with the global team in providing additional context to curb hate speech on the platform, reports the Daily Mirror newspaper.

According to Facebook's latest community standards enforcement report, the social media platform removed four million pieces of hate speech globally from the platform in the first quarter of the year.

The spokesperson highlighted that 65.4 per cent of hate speech content was removed by its proactive detection tools, compared to 51.5 per cent in 3Q18, which is a significant improvement.

"We have invested in proactive detection tools; AI tools become stronger over last few years," he said.

A team of Facebook officials also hosted its second community standard forum in Sri Lanka on Tuesday with civil society leaders and experts.

According to reports, there were nearly six million Facebook users in Sri Lanka as of last year and there was also a significant number of fake profiles originating from the island nation, which are mainly used to circulate harmful content.