Suspected Kremlin agents peddle falsehoods masquerading as Instagram models. The terrorist organization Hezbollah posts propaganda updates as if it were a news organization. More than 2 million Iraqis join Facebook groups where guns are bought and sold without checks.
Welcome to the world of Arabic-language social media — a Wild West where content moderation is minimal, foreign governments act with abandon, and jihadists foster online hate in arguably some of the world’s most war-torn countries.
Facebook, Twitter and other platforms have championed their efforts to clamp down on misinformation, politically divisive material and outright bigotry across the United States and European Union. But such checks — and any ensuing enforcement of these companies’ rules — have often been absent in Arabic-language social media, based on analysis by Digital Bridge, POLITICO’s transatlantic tech newsletter.
The failure of tech giants to sufficiently monitor what happens in Arabic — one of the fastest-growing demographics on social media, based on yearly new users, with 350 million Arabic speakers worldwide — highlights the disparities between how these companies are trying to crack down on harmful content in the West, while still missing scores of similar material in places like Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of these countries remain gridlocked by sectarian tension and where online hate can quickly spill over into offline violence.
For disinformation analysts, campaigning groups and some politicians within the region, it feels like a two-tier system, where one set of rules applies to Europe and the U.S., and another applies to the rest of the world.
“Groups don’t have to hide what they are doing because the moderation is so full of holes,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism. Ayad worked with POLITICO to uncover how a large amount of Arabic-language harmful content and state-backed disinformation remain widespread online.
“It’s just so frustrating,” he added. “[The social media companies] did investigations around the U.S. elections, even though they were late. It doesn’t feel like they’re doing that in [the] Middle East, proactively or reactively.”
In response, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, acknowledged that it still had more work to do when combating online hate in Arabic, but said it had increased the number of regional experts and made other investments over the past two years to police such material. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.