In “Careless People”, in the chapter on the Rohingya Genocide, a case is made for Facebook’s complicity in it. Essentially threatening and violence-inciting content got past moderation because the font that was used didn’t support Myanmar text. So there would be a report on a post but all the mod team would see was missing Unicode characters and mark the post as okay. By the time the serious violence started it was too late.
Now, I am not claiming a lack of text support caused a genocide, and I don’t think Wynn-Williams is either. Facebook was certainly culpable though, the military had direct controls over what was allowed to be posted and suppressed dissent. The issue could have been caught much earlier on and perhaps mitigated had off-shore moderation teams been able to read posts that were being flagged.
If you read contemporary reporting about anti-Muslim riots in Myanmar https://www.reuters.com/article/world/special-report-buddhis... you may learn that there were Buddhist monks traveling the country, giving sermons to crowds of thousands of people, telling them to treat Muslims as enemies, and stickers being used to visibly signal alignment with the movement.
Careless People is a story about Facebook from inside Facebook, so of course it adopts the viewpoint that Facebook's moderation decisions are very important, but ultimately they were a sideshow to what was playing out on the ground. This goes double for military attacks on Rohingya villages, which can hardly be explained as spontaneous reactions to some Facebook post.
In any case, Facebook moderators literate in Burmese would've known to use the right font, whereas for Facebook moderators trying to deal with a language they can't even read, the font choice would be the least of their problems.
The internet and the real world don't exist in separate vacuums. Internet communication and amplification of hate speech helped create an environment where hateful sermons were planned and popularized, and vice-versa.
Facebook pages and posts espousing these viewpoints (using sensationalized or completely fictional justifications) were then amplified by the algorithm. The amplification reached people that were not otherwise inclined to participate, but were convinced through information they received online.
You can't have one without the other. Influence is driven through both in-person physical events/marketing and online platforms. Categorizing the online influence as a "sideshow" completely misinterprets how important online communities have become in radicalization. "Reach" is a key social media metric for a reason.
Reach is indeed important. But the internet is not the only way to generate reach, nor necessarily the most effective one. During the riots in 2012 and 2013, 2% of the population were using the internet https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?location... and there were 14 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 population https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2?location... Meanwhile, a traveling monk wanting to hold a sermon about the importance of shunning Muslims could rely on the local religious community to deliver him an audience, and on word of mouth, flyers and posters to inform everyone who didn't attend.
Facebook's direct culpability in the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar had already been well-known and thoroughly reported on many years before Careless People.
This is from 2016, it's a fairly detailed study of what happens when a rural, barely (or illiterate) population gets access to a powerful social media tool:
I heard it was because .. in a country where they did tie-ups with mobile operators to 0 rate face book traffic, to make it to the point where the internet and facebook were the same thing to many people, they also only employed a handful of moderators. Meanwhile Politicians were posting incitements to violence on the platform.
They're confusing a few things by saying kanji is written top-to-bottom. Direction applies to all Japanese text, not just kanji -- which are simply one type of moji (characters). The traditional vertical format is called 縦書き (tategaki), and unlike the modern horizontal style (left-to-right), it runs top-to-bottom, right-to-left.
Here's some tategaki lyrics I wrote as an example:
Georgian is really easy. Each of its 33 letters makes one and only one sound, words are spaced, and there's no capital/lowercase. The most difficult part of reading it is pronouncing: the language does not care about syllables. Example: a popular Georgian band is მგზავრები ("Mgzavrebi" / Passengers).
Georgian does have a well-defined notion of ‘syllable’, it’s just that it allows an unusually wide range of consonant clusters in those syllables [0]. If you want a language which really doesn’t care about syllables there are better examples, e.g. Gokana [1,2]
Can confirm: I was on a holiday there and took reading it as a "side quest." Within a week I was fairly proficient. Note: this says nothing about understanding what you read, of which I had none!
It might be easier than you think to learn to read them. I learnt to read a foreign alphabet and compared to the actual language learning part you would be surprised how fast relatively our brains can adapt to new patterns (I’m still a slow reader in the second language I’m learning, but the beauty of reading is that you can take it at your own pace). Even if you don’t learn the language, you could have a new cool ability to write English words out in a different script :)
Start at က, work your way through Unicode in order: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%80%80#Translingual Some helpful Mon nationalist even made a writing animation for most letters before he got banned from Wikipedia. Fun fact: ပ is made with two strokes from opposite directions instead of a single one like you might naively expect.
I am fairly sure this is because, in many abugida scripts, the dominant writing material was palm leaf and the tool was a sharpened point or curved scalpel-like knife rather than a pen. If you curve inward from both sides, you don't have to contort your hand in a 180 degree pattern, which runs the risk of tearing the palm leaf. This is also why the shapes are all curves instead of hard 90 degree angles.
Is double-stroked text primarily used for math symbols, or? Might you be able to share an example link or image showing a realistic use case or two? I'd be happy to double-check that our stack can handle it, and amend the post after that with whatever we learn.
Edit: Just to share what I learned after looking into this a bit...
TLDR: No single font can display every character. OpenType fonts are capped at 65535 glyphs (the vector or bitmap shape to render), but Unicode has 150k+ defined characters. Noto itself is not one single font but a collection of them, at least one font per script (where each script might support several natural languages that share the same written characters). CSS's `font-family` fallback and `unicode-range` mechanisms allow us to define "which font should be used for which ranges (and thus which scripts)". We can mix and match several Noto fonts like this to support multiple scripts & languages together. This mechanism should also allow us to display extended math symbols via the separate Noto Sans Math font.
In “Careless People”, in the chapter on the Rohingya Genocide, a case is made for Facebook’s complicity in it. Essentially threatening and violence-inciting content got past moderation because the font that was used didn’t support Myanmar text. So there would be a report on a post but all the mod team would see was missing Unicode characters and mark the post as okay. By the time the serious violence started it was too late.
Now, I am not claiming a lack of text support caused a genocide, and I don’t think Wynn-Williams is either. Facebook was certainly culpable though, the military had direct controls over what was allowed to be posted and suppressed dissent. The issue could have been caught much earlier on and perhaps mitigated had off-shore moderation teams been able to read posts that were being flagged.
If you read contemporary reporting about anti-Muslim riots in Myanmar https://www.reuters.com/article/world/special-report-buddhis... you may learn that there were Buddhist monks traveling the country, giving sermons to crowds of thousands of people, telling them to treat Muslims as enemies, and stickers being used to visibly signal alignment with the movement.
Careless People is a story about Facebook from inside Facebook, so of course it adopts the viewpoint that Facebook's moderation decisions are very important, but ultimately they were a sideshow to what was playing out on the ground. This goes double for military attacks on Rohingya villages, which can hardly be explained as spontaneous reactions to some Facebook post.
In any case, Facebook moderators literate in Burmese would've known to use the right font, whereas for Facebook moderators trying to deal with a language they can't even read, the font choice would be the least of their problems.
The internet and the real world don't exist in separate vacuums. Internet communication and amplification of hate speech helped create an environment where hateful sermons were planned and popularized, and vice-versa.
Facebook pages and posts espousing these viewpoints (using sensationalized or completely fictional justifications) were then amplified by the algorithm. The amplification reached people that were not otherwise inclined to participate, but were convinced through information they received online.
You can't have one without the other. Influence is driven through both in-person physical events/marketing and online platforms. Categorizing the online influence as a "sideshow" completely misinterprets how important online communities have become in radicalization. "Reach" is a key social media metric for a reason.
Reach is indeed important. But the internet is not the only way to generate reach, nor necessarily the most effective one. During the riots in 2012 and 2013, 2% of the population were using the internet https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?location... and there were 14 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 population https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2?location... Meanwhile, a traveling monk wanting to hold a sermon about the importance of shunning Muslims could rely on the local religious community to deliver him an audience, and on word of mouth, flyers and posters to inform everyone who didn't attend.
Facebook's direct culpability in the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar had already been well-known and thoroughly reported on many years before Careless People.
Claiming muslims aren't the enemy is laughable.
This is from 2016, it's a fairly detailed study of what happens when a rural, barely (or illiterate) population gets access to a powerful social media tool:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-f...
https://archive.is/NVOwW
Another one, with many links to other reports for those who don't trust it because "Amnesty is biased".
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
I heard it was because .. in a country where they did tie-ups with mobile operators to 0 rate face book traffic, to make it to the point where the internet and facebook were the same thing to many people, they also only employed a handful of moderators. Meanwhile Politicians were posting incitements to violence on the platform.
They're confusing a few things by saying kanji is written top-to-bottom. Direction applies to all Japanese text, not just kanji -- which are simply one type of moji (characters). The traditional vertical format is called 縦書き (tategaki), and unlike the modern horizontal style (left-to-right), it runs top-to-bottom, right-to-left.
Here's some tategaki lyrics I wrote as an example:
https://codepen.io/kingcharlesone/pen/abgdPgZ
And if you want a really crazy (worst case) localization test, here's tategaki which includes English, Arabic, Hindi and some math:
https://codepen.io/kingcharlesone/pen/jEPNRLP
Myanmar script along with Georgian script are the most beautiful. I wish I could read them.
Georgian is really easy. Each of its 33 letters makes one and only one sound, words are spaced, and there's no capital/lowercase. The most difficult part of reading it is pronouncing: the language does not care about syllables. Example: a popular Georgian band is მგზავრები ("Mgzavrebi" / Passengers).
> the language does not care about syllables
Georgian does have a well-defined notion of ‘syllable’, it’s just that it allows an unusually wide range of consonant clusters in those syllables [0]. If you want a language which really doesn’t care about syllables there are better examples, e.g. Gokana [1,2]
[0] https://www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/063_fulltext.pdf
[1] https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman/papers/2011-hyman-go...
[2] https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman/papers/2015-hyman-go...
Can confirm: I was on a holiday there and took reading it as a "side quest." Within a week I was fairly proficient. Note: this says nothing about understanding what you read, of which I had none!
It might be easier than you think to learn to read them. I learnt to read a foreign alphabet and compared to the actual language learning part you would be surprised how fast relatively our brains can adapt to new patterns (I’m still a slow reader in the second language I’m learning, but the beauty of reading is that you can take it at your own pace). Even if you don’t learn the language, you could have a new cool ability to write English words out in a different script :)
＃インウルード＜アイオーストリーム>
ユージングネームスペースエスティーディー；
Yes writing English words in a different script is fun.
Dont leave us hanging, is it Korean (hangul) ?
Japanese: # In'urūdo < aiōsutorīmu > yūjingunēmusupēsuesutīdī
Start at က, work your way through Unicode in order: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%80%80#Translingual Some helpful Mon nationalist even made a writing animation for most letters before he got banned from Wikipedia. Fun fact: ပ is made with two strokes from opposite directions instead of a single one like you might naively expect.
I am fairly sure this is because, in many abugida scripts, the dominant writing material was palm leaf and the tool was a sharpened point or curved scalpel-like knife rather than a pen. If you curve inward from both sides, you don't have to contort your hand in a 180 degree pattern, which runs the risk of tearing the palm leaf. This is also why the shapes are all curves instead of hard 90 degree angles.
> Cherokee
Huh, learned something new : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
The problem is that noto lacks support for double stroked text, like "".
Is double-stroked text primarily used for math symbols, or? Might you be able to share an example link or image showing a realistic use case or two? I'd be happy to double-check that our stack can handle it, and amend the post after that with whatever we learn.
Noto actually has a specific math font... I wonder if that would work? https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Math
---
Edit: Just to share what I learned after looking into this a bit...
TLDR: No single font can display every character. OpenType fonts are capped at 65535 glyphs (the vector or bitmap shape to render), but Unicode has 150k+ defined characters. Noto itself is not one single font but a collection of them, at least one font per script (where each script might support several natural languages that share the same written characters). CSS's `font-family` fallback and `unicode-range` mechanisms allow us to define "which font should be used for which ranges (and thus which scripts)". We can mix and match several Noto fonts like this to support multiple scripts & languages together. This mechanism should also allow us to display extended math symbols via the separate Noto Sans Math font.
So does HN!