Cuban government apologizes to Montreal-area family after delivering wrong body
Cuba's foreign affairs minister has apologized to a Montreal-area family after they were sent the wrong body following the death of a loved one.
Actions by Facebook and its parent Meta during last year's Gaza war violated the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation and non-discrimination, a report commissioned by the social media company has found.
The report Thursday from independent consulting firm Business for Social Responsibility confirmed long-standing criticisms of Meta's policies and their uneven enforcement as it relates to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It found the company over-enforced rules when it came to Arabic content and under-enforced content in Hebrew.
It, however, did not find intentional bias at Meta, either by the company as a whole or among individual employees. The report's authors said they found "no evidence of racial, ethnic, nationality or religious animus in governing teams" and noted Meta has "employees representing different viewpoints, nationalities, races, ethnicities, and religions relevant to this conflict."
Rather, it found numerous instances of unintended bias that harmed the rights of Palestinian and Arabic-speaking users.
In response, Meta said it plans to implement some of the report's recommendations, including improving its Hebrew-language "classifiers," which help remove violating posts automatically using artificial intelligence.
"There are no quick, overnight fixes to many of these recommendations, as BSR makes clear," the company based in Menlo Park, California, said in a blog post Thursday. "While we have made significant changes as a result of this exercise already, this process will take time – including time to understand how some of these recommendations can best be addressed, and whether they are technically feasible."
Meta, the report confirmed, also made serious errors in enforcement. For instance, as the Gaza war raged last May, Instagram briefly banned the hashtag. AlAqsa, a reference to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City, a flash point in the conflict.
Meta, which owns Instagram, later apologized, explaining its algorithms had mistaken the third-holiest site in Islam for the militant group Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed offshoot of the secular Fatah party.
The report echoed issues raised in internal documents from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen last fall, showing that the company's problems are systemic and have long been known inside Meta.
A key failing is the lack of moderators in languages other than English, including Arabic – among the most common languages on Meta's platforms.
For users in the Gaza, Syria and other Middle East regions marred by conflict, the issues raised in the report are nothing new.
Israeli security agencies and watchdogs, for instance, have monitored Facebook and bombarded it with thousands of orders to take down Palestinian accounts and posts as they try to crack down on incitement.
"They flood our system, completely overpowering it," Ashraf Zeitoon, Facebook's former head of policy for the Middle East and North Africa region, who left in 2017, told The Associated Press last year. "That forces the system to make mistakes in Israel's favour."
Israel experienced an intense spasm of violence in May 2021 – with weeks of tensions in East Jerusalem escalating into an 11-day war with Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. The violence spread into Israel itself, with the country experiencing the worst communal violence between Jewish and Arab citizens in years.
In an interview this week, Israel's national police chief, Kobi Shabtai, told the Yediot Ahronot daily that he believed social media had fuelled the communal fighting. He called for shutting down social media if similar violence occurs again and said he had suggested blocking social media to lower the flames last year.
"I'm talking about fully shutting down the networks, calming the situation on the ground, and when it's calm reactivating them," he was quoted as saying. "We're a democratic country, but there's a limit."
The comments caused an uproar and the police issued a clarification saying that his proposal was only meant for extreme cases. Omer Barlev, the Cabinet minister who oversees police, also said that Shabtai has no authority to impose such a ban.
------
Associated Press reporter Josef Federman contributed from Jerusalem.
Cuba's foreign affairs minister has apologized to a Montreal-area family after they were sent the wrong body following the death of a loved one.
The federal government's proposed change to capital gains taxation is expected to increase taxes on investments and mainly affect wealthy Canadians and businesses. Here's what you need to know about the move.
On a night she should have been mourning, a nurse from Quebec's Laurentians region says she was forced to clean up her husband after he died at a hospital in Montreal.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is accusing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre of welcoming 'the support of conspiracy theorists and extremists,' after the Conservative leader was photographed meeting with protesters, which his office has defended.
"It's a bit of a complicated pattern; we've got a lot going on," said Jennifer Smith of the Meteorological Service of Canada in an interview with CTVNews.ca on Wednesday. "[As is] typical with weather, all of these things are related."
Boeing said Wednesday that it lost US$355 million on falling revenue in the first quarter, another sign of the crisis gripping the aircraft manufacturer as it faces increasing scrutiny over the safety of its planes and accusations of shoddy work from a growing number of whistleblowers.
Police tangled with student demonstrators in Texas and California while new encampments sprouted Wednesday at Harvard and other colleges as school leaders sought ways to defuse a growing wave of pro-Palestinian protests.
Members of the Bank of Canada's governing council were split on how long the central bank should wait before it starts cutting interest rates when they met earlier this month.
A North Bay, Ont., lawyer who abandoned 15 clients – many of them child protection cases – has lost his licence to practise law.
A property tax bill is perplexing a small townhouse community in Fergus, Ont.
When identical twin sisters Kim and Michelle Krezonoski were invited to compete against some of the world’s most elite female runners at last week’s Boston Marathon, they were in disbelief.
The giant stone statues guarding the Lions Gate Bridge have been dressed in custom Vancouver Canucks jerseys as the NHL playoffs get underway.
A local Oilers fan is hoping to see his team cut through the postseason, so he can cut his hair.
A family from Laval, Que. is looking for answers... and their father's body. He died on vacation in Cuba and authorities sent someone else's body back to Canada.
A former educational assistant is calling attention to the rising violence in Alberta's classrooms.
The federal government says its plan to increase taxes on capital gains is aimed at wealthy Canadians to achieve “tax fairness.”
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.
Kevin the cat has been reunited with his family after enduring a harrowing three-day ordeal while lost at Toronto Pearson International Airport earlier this week.