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Facebook groups use the carrot emoji to avoid automatic moderation of anti-vaccine content. The BBC has observed several groups, including one with hundreds of thousands of members in
Facebook groups use the carrot emoji to avoid automatic moderation of anti-vaccine content.
The BBC has observed several groups, including one with hundreds of thousands of members in which this orange emoji appears. instead of the word “vaccine”.
Facebook algorithms tend to focus on words rather than images.
In such groups, unconfirmed information is shared about people allegedly injured or killed by vaccines.
These groups were removed when the BBC alerted Facebook’s parent company Meta.
“We removed this group because it violated our terms. harmful disinformation policies and other similar content in accordance with this policy. “We continue to work closely with public health experts and the UK government to further address COVID vaccine misinformation,” the company said in a statement.
However, groups reappeared has been in our searches ever since.
One of them has been on the market for three years, but was renamed in August 2022 to focus on vaccine stories (previously dedicated to sharing “jokes, bets and funny videos”).
The rules of the largest group of all states: “use keywords for everything.”
And they add: “Never use words that start with c, vor: covid, vaccine or supplement.
It was created more than a year ago and More than 250,000 members.
Marc Owen-Jones, a disinformation researcher and associate professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, was invited to participate.
“They were people telling stories of family members who died shortly after getting the Covid-19 vaccine,” he said.
But instead of the words ‘covid-19’ or ‘vaccine’, they used the carrot emoji.”
“At first I was a little confused. And then I realized that they were used as a way to avoid, or at least try, Facebook’s fake news detection algorithms ».
Data from the UK Statistics Office in 2021 assessed the risk of dying from the covid vaccine at one in five million, Compared to 35,000 deaths disease of every five million infected unvaccinated.
Tech giants use algorithms to scan their platforms for malicious content.
But these are above all detect words and textssaid Hannah Rose Kirk on a blog for the Oxford Internet Institute.
Rose Kirk was part of a research team that created a tool called HatemojiCheck: a checklist for identifying areas where artificial intelligence (AI) systems don’t handle things well. Abuses in the use of emoji.
“Despite having an impressive understanding of how language works, AI language models have seen very few emojis,” he said.
“Countless books, articles, websites, and even the English Wikipedia are fully trained, but these texts rarely contain emojis.”
Emojis can have multiple meanings in addition to those officially declared by Unicode, the consortium that manages them.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration has issued a warning on how they can be used. emojis to talk about illegal drugs.
And social media platforms have already come under fire for not blocking or removing them. monkey and banana emojis when posted as racist expressions in the accounts of black football players.
“This is a modern form of steganography: to write and hide a message for all to see, but in such a way that you don’t know where to look, I did not seeProfessor Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey, said:
“What all this shows is that trying to automate content moderation to prevent sharing of ‘harmful’ material is futile,” he explained, because people “develop new resources to communicate.”
Facebook announced last year Over 20 million content removed with false information about covid-19 or the vaccine since the beginning of the pandemic.
It also claimed to have deleted content that claimed vaccines were generally more dangerous than the diseases they protected or were toxic.
US President Joe Biden criticized the US. tech giants aren’t doing enough Addressing the spread of online misinformation about vaccines.
He said he hopes Facebook will do more to combat the “ugly misinformation” about coronavirus vaccines spreading on its platform.
Source: El Nacional
Alice Smith is a seasoned journalist and writer for Div Bracket. She has a keen sense of what’s important and is always on top of the latest trends. Alice provides in-depth coverage of the most talked-about news stories, delivering insightful and thought-provoking articles that keep her readers informed and engaged.
