Incident 414: Facebook Gave Vulgar English Translation of Chinese President's Name

Description: Facebook provided a vulgar Burmese-English translation of the Chinese president's name in posts of an official Burmese politician's Facebook page announcing his visit.

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Alleged: Facebook developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Xi Jinping and Aung San Suu Kyi.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
414
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2020-01-18
Editors
Khoa Lam
Facebook says technical error caused vulgar translation of Chinese leader's name
reuters.com · 2020

YANGON (Reuters) - Facebook Inc FB.O on Saturday blamed a technical error for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s name appearing as “Mr Shithole” in posts on its platform when translated into English from Burmese, apologizing for any offense caused…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.