Facebook becomes a haven for abusers and extremists in the Kurdistan Region

30-03-2023 02:01

PEREGRAF- Renwar Najm

Unlike content for other languages, social media posts in Kurdish often go unmonitored on Facebook, enabling the platform to become a haven for abusers and political extremists.

Facebook recently tightened its content moderation rules to counter extremism, violence, hate, and misinformation. The platform regularly bans groups publishing content in English who violate those rules.  However, similar content is being posted freely and unmoderated in Kurdish. Users often report the offending content, but the social media giant fails to take action.

Facebook is the most widely-used social media platform in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. Data published using Meta’s advertising resources indicates that Facebook had 17.95 million users in Iraq in early 2023. Despite this high level of use, there seem to be few Kurdish speakers working for the platform to respond to misinformation and abuse.

Peregraf launched an investigation into how controversial Kurdish content on Facebook is handled. As part of that, its staff submitted reports about several posts that engaged in explicit misinformation and hate speech as a test for whether the platform would respond. However, all but one of the reports proved futile.

Facebook did not respond to Peregraf’s request for comment about whether they have enough staff to review reported content in Kurdish or how they deal with this issue.

While in ordinary circumstances, Facebook is less than active in policing misinformation and harmful content, it has taken some steps in the past to regulate Kurdish content on its platform.

In a rare move in May 2020, Facebook took down more than 400 pages and groups based in the Kurdistan Region for allegedly "coordinated inauthentic behavior". According to the company, the assets typically supported the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Lahur Sheikh Jangi, who was at the time the co-leader of the party, and criticized the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and its leaders from the Barzani family.

"The individuals behind this network used fake accounts — some of which had been previously detected and disabled by our automated systems — to post in Groups, impersonate local politicians and political parties, and manage Pages masquerading as local news entities," said Facebook in a statement.

It added that "although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with Zanyari Agency, part of the intelligence services of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraqi Kurdistan."

Despite the proliferation of pages supporting one political leader or another in the Kurdistan Region, this is the only example where Facebook publicly took down this kind of network. Targeting a particular politician while neglecting the others raises questions about the reasons behind that move and whether Sheikh Jangi’s political rivals were able to use their influence to spur the company into action.

"Some people and media outlets are using fake news or unconfirmed news in order to attract people and get more engagements for their posts," said Harem Karem, director of Pasewan, an NGO that closely monitors disinformation and fake news in the Kurdistan Region’s information ecosystem. "This leads to promoting fake news and sometimes causes political and social tensions," he added.

Pasewan has identified at least 257 instances of fake news and misinformation published or broadcast by Kurdish media outlets, all of which were then promoted on social media platforms and reached hundreds of thousands of people. Yet, Facebook or other social media platforms have not taken any measures against this misleading content.

Particularly during political crises and election campaigns, Facebook becomes a platform for defamation and spreading hate speech and misinformation. Ahead of national elections in different countries, Meta assembles teams that are tasked with working closely with election authorities and trusted partners in the country. Additionally, they invest in people and technology to help reduce "the spread of misinformation, detect and remove hate speech, improve digital literacy, and help make political advertising more transparent."

So far, Meta has employed this strategy in Brazil, Ghana, Italy, and Nigeria, among others. But it has not done so in Iraq or the Kurdistan Region and there is no sign they will implement the strategy ahead of regional elections set for November 18.

As explained by the Institute for Multiparty Democracy, which is based in the Netherlands, regimes across the world are weaponizing social media in elections, especially to promote fake news and undermine the trust of citizens in the integrity of electoral systems.

The institute argues that social media is responsible for "exacerbating the ends of the political spectrum and relentlessly publishing unchecked content, providing an anonymous veil on fake news, hate speech and extremist opinions."

During election campaigns in the Kurdistan Region, political parties and candidates spend hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting content on Facebook without any monitoring from the platform. According to Meta’s own data, more than $1.6 million has been spent by Iraqi advertisers on Facebook since August 2021, mostly for elections and political ads.

Arabic-language social media users also suffer from poor content moderation. According to internal Facebook documents from late 2020, only 6 percent of hate content published in Arabic was detected on Instagram before it made its way onto the photo-sharing platform, which is owned by Meta. That was much lower than a 40 percent takedown rate on Facebook.

Ads attacking women and the LGBTQ community were rarely flagged for removal in the Middle East. In a related survey, Egyptian users told Meta that they were afraid of posting political views on the platform for fear of being arrested or attacked online.

Kamal Rauf, the editor-in-chief of Sharpress, a popular online Kurdish outlet, blames the Kurdistan Region’s political parties for dysfunction on social media. He says that dozens of Facebook pages are funded by political parties, whose only purpose is to attack critics and mislead consumers.

"Social media is used by political parties to defame political opponents and undermine independent media outlets, and it has negative consequences for the whole society," Rauf said.

The issue is not merely related to political content, but other topics as well, including harassment of women. Misogynistic comments are common on Kurdish social media, especially on Facebook. Smear campaigns are regularly carried out against prominent Kurdish women, mainly orchestrated by extreme religious clerics. Facebook has done little to prevent these attacks.

"Facebook and other social media platforms are meant to service society, but they are the source of problems in Kurdistan," Sahyma Faraidoon, lawyer and civil society activist, told Peregraf, adding that defamatory content should have legal consequences given the laws in the Kurdistan Region.

According to Article 2 of the Communications Device Misuse Law (No. 6, 2008), whoever is convicted of purposely using their phone or any other communication device, the Internet, or email to abuse others can be sentenced to prison for no less than six months and no more than five years. Fines are set at between 1 million and 5 million Iraqi dinars (between $765 and $3,820). However, the authorities in the Kurdistan Region mostly use the law to target journalists and political critics, rather than those who target women and other vulnerable groups.