Facebook is everywhere but its Arabic moderation is nowhere close. Facebook’s AI treats Palestinian activists like it treats American Black activists. It blocks them.

Globally, over 25 Arabic dialects are spoken, which poses difficulties for social media algorithms to be automated to pick up on harmful content, triggers, online violence, etc. These algorithms are designed with the English language in mind, which automatically creates a very hostile environment for non-English speakers online. As a result, Meta wrongly censors the most banal posts in Arabic under the guise of harmful content due to translation issues – showing obvious prejudice over the control of use of vocabulary in providing protection of communities (eg. The use of the word “Zionist” is moderated by meta).

So, I’d like to address two main questions: In the territory of online distribution, to what extent is the Arabic language being colonized? As well as, how can non-English speakers navigate a space that is not designed with our engagement in mind?

Arabic language users have modified their engagement with all online platforms by creating multiple new ways of writing, the most common being Arabizi. Arabizi is a chat alphabet that is defined as using “Romanized alphabets for informal Arabic dialects, in which Arabic script is transcribed or encoded into a combination of Latin script and Arabic numerals.” Given that this is speaking in informal dialects, which differ greatly amongst territories, as well as the combination of Roman letters and numbers with no official correct way of spelling, it results in a coded text that relies on a human flexible knowledge of the language that would be difficult for an algorithm to be programmed to understand.

I have decided to tackle this through a Shai Series, which would be a video compilation of four different tea recipes. This is for two reasons: the first being the banality of making tea – quoting my mother: all you have to do is add a lipton tea bag to hot water; the second being the violent weight of the notion of tea from colonial histories to contemporary agricultural conditions. Using clippings from COP 27 - that was hosted in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt earlier this year - of world leaders that represent places or institutions that have had a direct impact on different parts of the Arab world, namely: António Guterres – Secretary-General of the United Nations, Joe Biden – current president of the United States, Emmanuel Macron – current president of France, and Rishi Sunak – current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. These videos have a machinic generated voiceover of different Shai (tea) recipes, reading out the recipes in Arabizi. This distances the voice from the moving image; however, it highlights the absence of scrutiny by the algorithm over both certain individuals and English sentences. Finally, for the title of the project the word COP was translated to Arabic as “كوب”, which translates back to cup.