Hours after the Israel-Hamas conflict erupted on Oct. 7, Bharat Nayak, a fact-checker in the east Indian state of Jharkhand, noticed a surge of disinformation and hate speech directed at Muslims on his dashboard of WhatsApp messages. “The content is very graphic, the messaging is extreme, and it gets forwarded many times, as there is no content moderation on WhatsApp” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. REAL-WORLD HARMSFailures of content moderation are not limited to the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict. They are a result of the hate speech online, said Marc Owen Jones, who researches disinformation in the Middle East. Yet despite heated conversations around the need for better content moderation, trust and safety is “resource-intensive, meaning that tackling the issue is a challenge for any platform,” said Yu-Lan Scholliers, head of product at Checkstep, a UK-based content moderation services firm.

Source: Ethiopian News October 31, 2023 12:47 UTC