
Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested - pulisse
https://www.theverge.com/us-world/2017/10/24/16533496/facebook-apology-wrong-translation-palestinian-arrested-post-good-morning
======
AdmiralAsshat
Given how ridiculously common the phrase "Good morning" is in Arabic, (I mean,
look at any Arabic 101 textbook, the Sabah Al-khair / Sabah al-noor exchange
is one of the first things they teach you), it's puzzling why Facebook's
translation algorithm didn't see that as a fixed phrase, rather than trying to
translate it word by word.

So much for machine learning.

~~~
shp0ngle
Most sources for machine translation from Arabic-English pairs are data from
US Army / anti-terrorist data.

So the data are learned to translate terrorist messages very well, as well as
army terms. However, it doesn't translate day-to-day use that well.

Machine learning is only as good as the source data - and Arabic-English
language pair specifically has data from US military complex, that loves
translating terrorist messages. So translating Al Qaeda messaging will be
good, translating regular message boards will be worse. The machine learns to
translate everything as an attack, since that is what it knows.

(I cannot give you exact sources, but I knew people from inside Google.
Facebook uses Bing, but I think the data sources will be similar.)

~~~
kfrzcode
> Most sources for machine translation from Arabic-English pairs are data from
> US Army / anti-terrorist data.

Interesting! This is HN, where's the source?

> I cannot give you exact sources

I find your claim hard enough to believe but this seals the deal.

~~~
Udik
It'll turn out in due time that Bin Laden was just sending the US his best
wishes.

Joking of course, but up to a point. There are cases of words from the "enemy"
deliberately translated in their more literal sense when their sense is
figurative (one for all, "death to America"\- even the _official_ translation
is "down with America"). And statements by Bin Laden himself have been
deliberately ignored in the parts that made more sense from a political point
of view, to reduce them to a more comfortable "we hate you because you're
free".

------
ch4s3
The operative quote from the article is: "no Arabic-speaking officer had read
the man’s Facebook post."

This reminds me of the kind of alarmist, ham fisted policing we often see in
America, where police will barge into an elderly person's home and trash the
place because they forgot to double check the address.

~~~
rbanffy
I would consider obvious it'd be enormously advantageous for Israeli police to
have, at least, a basic understanding of Arabic.

It's like a Miami policemen without any Spanish/Portuguese knowledge.

~~~
ars
A lot of them do, it's very common for Israeli's to be fluent in Arabic. But
not all of them obviously.

And in this case, considering what someone with evil intent and a bulldozer
can do, I can understand arrest first, figure out what's going on second.

It's not like arresting someone after the fact - in that situation you can
take some time. Here it's before the fact, and seconds count.

~~~
ch4s3
You'd think they'd take the 30s required grab literally the first person in
the office they could find who can understand the language it's written in.

Moreover, how did they arrest him without someone speaking a modicum of
Arabic? Or did they just run into his home and snatch him by force?

I personally find this kind of behavior by the armed representatives of
government to be horribly undemocratic.

------
smileysteve
This is scary and 1984 ish. A man was __arrested __because of a bad
translation.

~~~
pjc50
Collateral damage. People are routinely murdered for being in the same area as
people who are suspected of terrorism on the basis of evidence which has never
seen a courtroom.

~~~
jstanley
Not sure if you're saying that makes it OK. I don't think that makes it OK.

------
guelo
What an awful society that is where you can get arrested for posting two words
on social media by a police department run by politicians you can't vote for.

------
FourPostWonder
The predator will not eat a bad tasting butterfly, but we can trick it to do
so.

They talk about a "linguistic translation" error in the attempt to deflect
focus away from the meta data triggers that this person generated.

Cyber phrenology is real.

[https://www.cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly-
War/](https://www.cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly-War/)

~~~
asddddd
An amusing read, but the overbearing narcissism (I did this; something
happened; that something is therefore caused by my action) makes it hard to
read as a rational argument and not a psychoanalysis case study.

~~~
FilterSweep
This is where I saw the author being a blackhatter parading as a greyhatter.
Or maybe even worse, a blackhatter who doesn't know he's a blackhatter.

The idea that _increasing_ the noise/signal ratio (ie: "make them eat more
butterflies") is going to cause Facebook and their ilk to see the flaw in
reasoning is not only malicious (Milo's 20,000 fake followers + residuals did
not go away), but it also betrays a profoundly scary naivete over the subject
matter.

It makes it worse when you write off your body of work as "for research" but
fail to set up a methodology more complex than "provoke social justice people
into attacking each other, algorithmically."

The entire piece neglects to consider the "rm monkey" ie: the trolls that
don't have such motives but chaos. Some of us, growing up, just liked to see
systems implode. He surrounds himself with them on 4chan but fails to
recognize the complexity of their brigading.

The author, a self-perceived "arbiter of truth" waving his scepter (an
infantile of scripts), finds himself far more intelligent than both his merry
band of trolls on 4chan, Google/Facebook, and protected groups all at the same
time - but he may be wrong on all 3 accounts.

Dunning Krueger is not understanding that many on 4chan prefer the butterfly
war.

~~~
FourPostWonder
The author performed all of this during a three year period, I believe.

If ego was the only driving focus, wouldn't he have revealed himself earlier?
Especially during the rise of alt-right micro-celebrities? How can you be a
mere narcissist with a Hollywood background and completely avoid intentionally
giving yourself the limelight?

This strikes me as something far more methodical.

------
Synaesthesia
The fact that you can get arrested for a Facebook post in Israel is already
alarming.

~~~
qq66
In what country can you never be arrested for a Facebook post?

~~~
Synaesthesia
In the US which has freedom of speech laws. But which country has arrested
users for Facebook posts other than authoritarian countries? Particularly for
such a relatively innocuous post.

~~~
bigbugbag
People have been arrested over facebook in the US, for example:

[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/18/facebook-
com...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/18/facebook-comments-
arrest-prosecution) [http://www.businessinsider.com/people-arrested-for-
facebook-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/people-arrested-for-facebook-
posts-2013-7?IR=T)

AFAIK most of the countries have had arrestations over facebook posts, those
who have not are following this global trend.

~~~
Synaesthesia
Interesting I did not know that. Of course there are limits to free speech.
Threats, and involvement in criminal activity, like if I order somebody to
shoot someone, that’s not protected by free speech. This was a pretty innucous
statement not a threat.

------
jaynos
Facebook often asks me if I want to translate posts that are already in
English. I'm not surprised that "mistakes may happen".

------
iandev
This is both the fault of Facebook and the police. Unfortunately, not all
police forces require evidence to arrest people. I would argue that the larger
problem is actually the way in which the police handled this and not so much
Facebook's inaccurate translation.

------
adrianlmm
It remains me to this:
[http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/i/3/2/d/a/image.r...](http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/i/3/2/d/a/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gi31y6.png/1435790539118.png)

------
YeGoblynQueenne
Maybe they feared he was preparing an attack using a goedendag [1] (itself
named after a possibly mythical shibboleth [2])?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goedendag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goedendag)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth)

------
xlat32
Note that in Arabic there are no vowels. Also note that it's not the common
"good morning" (Sabah Al-khair), but a rarer term: one word, 6 letters, no
vowels. The equivalent in english would be "gdmrng".

~~~
Eyas
No, seeing as there are no vowels in Arabic, the equivalent is not an English
word with vowels, with the vowels removed.

It is a shortened form though, and is equivalent to "Morning!"

~~~
xlat32
Arabic text has much higher entropy than English. The last two letters in the
Arabic word he used (H M) is also the common suffix for "them". That's not
strictly equivalent to simply "Morning!" in English.

Maybe the translation algorithm confused "Yisbah-hum" (good morning) with
"Yitbah-hum" (Kill them)?

~~~
djrogers
Thank you! all this reading, including the source article, and finally someone
gives a likely source for the mistake.

------
Stranger43
How does that happen?

I know that "googlebombing" google translate used to be a thing as i have seen
it done fairly often(usually stuff like translating android to iphone etc) in
the Danish/English translator, where the fact that a few votes could change a
words meaning.

I wondering if what happened here is a less harmless version of that were a
group of people deliberately messing with crowd sourced translation tools, and
if facebook have any kind of sanity checking on their translate function or if
they are as vulnerable as google translate to that kind of manipulation?

------
electriclove
I'm not exactly a Facebook fan but the blame for this needs to be shared by
the Israeli police.

~~~
maxerickson
Blame should rest mostly on the police.

~~~
bigbugbag
IMHO responsibility is 90% facebook, 8% people who reported it and 2% police.
I do not expect police officers to be expert in using facebook.

~~~
eh78ssxv2f
I think it is 99% police. I do not use FB translate, but Google translate.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. I expect that it is not 100%
reliable, and anybody who frequently uses the automated translation tools for
critical tasks (presumably the police in this case) should know this. My
suspicion is that this was just an excuse for the police to arrest somebody.

------
kwhitefoot
I pasted the offending Arabic into Google translate and got "Become them"
([https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D9%8A%D8%B5%D8%A8%D8%...](https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D9%8A%D8%B5%D8%A8%D8%AD%D9%87%D9%85)).

Bing just says "become", Translate.com and Cambridge dictionaries have "Come
in the morning to them".

Yandex says "ISG world"!

All a bit odd or downright weird but none so threatening as Facebook's. Was
Facebook's translation engine sabotaged?

------
FilterSweep
The trend will continue as long as the 0 accountability standard remains.

~~~
huac
For Facebook or the Israeli state?

~~~
Twirrim
Both?

~~~
FilterSweep
precisely - but Facebook sits upstream here

~~~
mrguyorama
I have no love for Facebook, but it should always be the LEO's duty to verify
everything, even if just to save their own ass.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
[https://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-
tw...](https://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two-people-
puts-three-more-in-jail)

------
elietoubi
Crazy!!! ... let's take politics aside for a sec. What if the man was actually
planning an attack? That would be really crazy that an AI tool could actually
find that with the context of the picture.

Let's give another example ... let's say I pose with a fake gun and I write:
"Ready to party" would the algorithm render a different translation than if I
posed with balloons?

------
whipoodle
That's strange. I'm sure it could just as easily have happened to an Israeli
citizen. (Just kidding!)

