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Incident 7226 Report
Facebook translates 'good morning' into 'attack them', leading to arrest

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Facebook auto-translation AI error results in Palestinian man's arrest
privacyinternational.org · 2017

A mistake in Facebook's machine translation service led to the arrest and questioning of a Palestinian man by Israeli police. The man, a construction worker on the West Bank, posted a picture of himself leaning against a bulldozer like those that have been used in hit-and-run terrorist attacks, with a caption that correctly translates to "good morning". Facebook's AI translated it into "hurt them" in English or "attack them" in Hebrew. Based on that, police officers arrested him later that day and questioned him for several hours before realising their mistake. The large number of dialects in use around the world means that Arabic is particularly difficult for machine translation services to handle, and mistakes are a regular occurrence. Facebook has apologised for the error.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/palestinian-arrested-over-mistranslated-good-morning-facebook-post-1.5459427

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