I Searched for a Religious Language in Amharic and Got Sexual Content Instead: Online Harm in Low-Resourced Languages
Date:
Will be giving a Spotlight talk at the Black In AI Workshop co-located with NeurIPS (Upcoming).
Description: Despite guardrails put in place by social media platforms, users are exposed to online harm. In this talk we will look at how benign search queries result in policy-violating sexual content on YouTube in Amharic. Findings from semi-structured interviews with Ethiopian women and analysis of data collected directly from the platform highlight how the disparity in the performance of content moderation for low-resourced languages combined with the socio-economic standings of users results in disparate experiences. I will conclude the talk with some recommendations for policy makers and technologists.