"Facebook urged to do more to stop LGBT+ hate speech in Arab countries", July 1st 2020

LGBT+ rights groups urged Facebook on Tuesday to act on a rise in online hate speech after the death of an Egyptian activist jailed for waving the rainbow flag.. [ This was after] Sarah Hegazy was found dead two weeks ago in her apartment in Canada, the country she fled to after being charged with “promoting sexual deviancy” in Egypt, where discrimination against the LGBT+ community is rife.

“Although the MENA LGBTQI+ community has been reporting thousands of Arabic hate speech posts ... most of these reports were declined because the content ‘did not contradict the Facebook community standards’,” the letter stated.

In response, Facebook said it had teams reviewing reports of hate speech 24/7 in more than 50 languages, including Arabic, and that its AI tools found nearly 90% of the hate speech it removes before users reported it.