Associated Incidents
Bad translations often make good comedy, but in the case of this Palestinian man, they marked the start of a nightmare.
Israeli police arrested the man, a construction worker in a West Bank settlement near Jerusalem, after he posted on Facebook a picture of himself leaning against a bulldozer with the caption reading "يصبحهم" or "Good Morning" in Arabic.
Facebook's automatic translation service, which uses its own AI system, translated the post into "attack them" in Hebrew, or "hurt them" in English:
In predictive policing news: Israel arrested a Palestinian for posting a pic on Facebook next to a bulldozer saying “good morning” just because Facebook incorrectly translated the Arabic phrase to mean “hurt them”. Full article on Haaretz - https://t.co/kk1A51BcUy pic.twitter.com/BUOVONWIrc — Asaf Lubin (@AsafLubin) October 23, 2017
For this reason, the Israeli Judea and Samaria District police detained the man ad questioned him for several hours on suspicion he's going to use the bulldozer for a hit-and-run attack, according to Haaretz.
During this whole process, no Arabic speaker was consulted to double-check on the Facebook's automatic translation.
After realising their mistake, police released the man, Haaretz reported.
Facebook told Mashable it was looking into the issue. In a statement to Gizmodo, Facebook's engineering manager Necip Fazil Ayan said: