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Facebook blamed a failure in language identification for the video passing censors and remaining online for five months.
Facebook and its parent company Meta are under fire from an Oversight Board that sharply criticized the social media juggernaut after it failed to stop the posting of a video showing two gay men being beaten and abused by a crowd of Nigerians. The video remained live on Facebook for five months.
“A Facebook user in Nigeria posted a video that shows two bleeding men who look like they could have been tied up and beaten,” the report noted. “People around the frightened men ask them questions in one of Nigeria’s major languages, Igbo. In response, one of the men responds with his name and explains, seemingly under coercion, that he was beaten for having sex with another man. The user who posted this content included an English caption mocking the men, stating they were caught having sex and that this is ‘funny’ because they are married.”
The report went on to note that the video violated four community standards, with a particular focus on the Coordinating Harm and Promoting Crime rule which is supposed to prevent the identification of “members of an outing-risk group.”
“The man’s admission in the video of having sex with another man is forced, while the caption explicitly alleges the men are gay,” the report revealed. “The content also broke rules on hate speech, bullying and harassment, and violent and graphic content.”
When confronted by the Oversight Board, Meta identified two failures that resulted in the video being posted and the video remaining online. The first was that the automated language detection system misidentified the original language of Igbo as English, and then it was later misidentified as Swahili during a human review.
Nigeria remains one of the most dangerous countries for the LGBTQ+ community. The Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act bans not only bans marriage equality but also same-sex public displays of affection. A 2023 report from the Pew Research Analysis found only two percent of Nigerians surveyed saying they were in support of marriage equality, the lowest support of any country in the world.
The human rights group Outright International has repeatedly warned that LGBTQ+ rights have been under attack in Nigeria for years. The group notes that half of the country adopted, “a form of Sharia Law that makes same-sex relations punishable by death and criminalizes gender expression which does not correspond with gender norms associated with the sex assigned at birth.” Homosexuality currently carries a punishment of up to 14 years imprisonment under Nigerian law.
Nigeria has proven deadly for members of the LGBTQ+ community.
In August of 2023, the battered and bruised body of Abuja Area Mama, a popular transgender TikTok influencer, was found along a highway in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. The 33-year-old influencer was reportedly on her way to visit her boyfriend when she was murdered. She often posted about life as a transgender woman in Nigeria as well as about being a sex worker. She made one final post to Instagram on the night she was slain.
Also in August of last year, police arrested 67 people celebrating a same-sex wedding, one of the largest mass detentions targeting the LGBTQ+ community. State police spokesperson Bright Edafe at the time told reporters that homosexuality “will never be tolerated” in Nigeria.
