Are governments weaponizing AI to reshape public discourse and whitewash their crimes?
Whistleblowers at Meta’s Integrity Organization have shared data with International Corruption Watch (ICW), revealing evidence of a mass censorship strategy abusing Meta’s reporting system.
Normal Takedown Process
User Reports—Any Facebook user can flag a post.
AI Screening—The post is first checked by a content enforcement AI model that reviews the text and associated media. If the model is confident, it will remove the post.
Human Review—If the model is not confident, the report will be escalated to a human reviewer.
Training Loop—If a human approves the takedown, the post is labeled as a piece of training data and fed back to the AI’s training dataset, allowing for the model to adapt in real-time.
Meta’s public description of this pipeline is available at https://transparency.meta.com/enforcement/detecting-violations/how-enforcement-technology-works.
Prioritizing Government Requests
Governments and privileged entities have special access to submit takedown requests. These requests are given priority and are sent directly to human reviewers. They can be submitted by form or direct email to Meta depending on which country is involved.
These reports are handled faster and are more likely to be removed. Similarly, when approved by a human, it is given a label and added to the training dataset.
When large amounts of government-submitted requests are approved, the AI model receives a flood of labeled examples that it further trains itself on.
When abused, this is an example of a machine-learning attack called a “data-poisoning” attack. The model eventually becomes heavily biased towards removing content that matches the pattern of reports.
International Corruption Watch Investigation
The ICW theorizes that governments like Israel use mass reporting during a crisis to shape public opinion. In this report, ICW aggregated data and then analyzed takedown requests from the Israeli government.
Prior to the October 7th attack, Israeli government reports averaged ~100 per day. After the attack, the daily volume skyrocketed to 150 to 400 reports per day.
What’s in a Report
Each report is associated with a source country where the post originated. Unlike other countries, the data shows Israel focused on posts originating in the surrounding countries, like Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Algeria, and Yemen. These few neighboring countries made up a whopping 69% of their reports. Israeli reports of posts originating from the US contributed to only 0.7% of the total report volume.
The Timing
Zooming in, we can see how activity picked up after October 7th and shifted focus from Palestine to the surrounding region. Also of note is the drop in reports every seven days, coinciding with Shabbat.
Although Israel has the most takedown requests per capita, there are other governments also sending large numbers of reports, including Pakistan, Malaysia, Brazil, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and the UAE.
Remarkably, these countries focus on removing posts within their own countries and for fairly different removal categories (“locally illegal”).
Here’s a graph from the report showing top reporting countries versus the nations they reported:
A Bit of Poison for Your Data
The ICW team examined the correlation between all reports automatically flagged as “terroristic” by Meta’s AI across every country. As you can see, a huge spike followed October 7th. This suggests model overfitting.
Meta’s AI became hypersensitive to any content featuring news footage or discussion of Palestine, leading to large-scale removal worldwide.
This is equivalent to content being censored across all countries at the same time.
Ctrl C You Later
According to the ICW report, the Israeli government submitted a single template for each takedown request. It contained:
A description of the October 7th attack and an official Israeli account
Citations of Israeli counter-terrorism laws
Links to multiple reported posts
The report alleges identical requests were sent tens of thousands of times without any additional context or reasoning for each unique post.
The data indicates that Meta approved these reports 94% of the time, with an average 30-second human review. This approval rate was far more successful and quicker than other countries.
This suggests there’s an unusual bias towards Israeli-originating reports.
Scale of the Impact
ICW estimates that ~38.8M posts have been actioned by the Content Enforcement Model’s data poisoning. Posts were removed not because they violated policy but because the model was over-trained on mass reports from the government.
The ICW report may get more stock from an earlier Human Rights Watch analysis that showed Israel’s use of mass reporting to suppress critics by reporting posts as “spam.” Meta later acknowledged and issued an apology for the unintended censorship.
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