Facebook is often accused of failing to contain the spread of hate speech and offensive content here in the US, and that problem is only more pronounced overseas. For instance, this week, the BBC reported the shocking story of an Ethiopian student who found out his father was killed by seeing a picture of his dead body on Facebook.

According to experts, this kind of graphic content often stays on Facebook longer than it should because the company hasn’t adequately invested in international content moderators.

“I know Facebook says that it has moderators who focus on Ethiopia, who are Amharic speakers and Tigrinya speakers, but we don’t know how many. And they are not even working from Ethiopia, they are working in Kenya,” fact-checking consultant Rehobot Ayalew told the BBC.

Ayalew went on to describe a video that went viral in the country last year depicting a man being burned alive. The content was allowed to remain on the platform for far too long, evidently avoiding detection.

“First of all, the artificial intelligence by itself should have removed it,” she continued. “Then even after it gets reported, it should have been removed quickly, but it stayed for some hours.”

Of course, Facebook has strict rules in place prohibiting violent content from being posted. However, it seems as though the company needs to do a better job of enforcing those policies.

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