Meta's supervisory board expressed serious concern on Tuesday that the company had not removed a viral graphic video showing two men bleeding after apparently being beaten because they were allegedly gay.
The video was published in Nigeria , one of more than 30 of Africa's 54 countries where homosexuality is criminalized by laws that enjoy widespread public support despite constitutional guarantees of freedoms. These laws are often used to unlawfully target and arrest people suspected of being homosexual, with abuses against them frequently going unpunished.
The report states that the damage caused by the video, which was viewed more than 3.6 million times between December 2023 and February of this year, is "immediate and impossible to repair" .
The council stated that the content "shared and mocked violence and discrimination" and that, although it was flagged multiple times and reviewed by three human moderators, it remained on Facebook for approximately five months, despite violating four different rules.
"Because the video remained online, the chances of someone identifying the men and the message encouraging users to attack other LGBTQIA+ people in Nigeria increased ," the panel stated. "Even after the video was removed, the Commission's research shows that footage from the same video remained on Facebook."
In this video, two men are seen bleeding while a crowd of people question them about their identity and sexual orientation.
The company admitted two errors regarding the video, the panel said, in that its automated systems identified the language spoken in the video as English when it was actually Igbo, a language spoken in southeastern Nigeria "but not supported by Meta for content moderation at scale ," and that Meta's human review teams also misidentified the language as Swahili .
"This raises questions about how content in unsupported languages is handled, about the choice of languages the company supports for large-scale review, and about the accuracy of translations provided to reviewers working in multiple languages ," the committee said.
In its report, the committee recommended that Meta update its Community Standard Coordinating Harm and Promoting Crime to include clear examples of "at-risk groups" , conduct an assessment of the accuracy of the enforcement of the prohibition on exposing the identity or location of individuals believed to belong to such groups, ensure that language detection systems identify content in unsupported languages, and provide accurate translations when routing content for review.
