Moderating Maghrebi Arabic Content on Social Media

People express their deepest desires, emotions, and imaginative ideas through language. However, Global North languages, particularly English, dominate in knowledge-sharing and technology. This has led to the marginalization of, and inadequate support for, Global South languages in digital spaces, particularly in the realm of content moderation. Content moderation systems often struggle with Global South languages due to inadequate and unrepresentative training data in addition to a lack of understanding of the cultural nuances that inform the meaning of language. In this report, part of a CDT series investigating content moderation biases and disparities in the Global South, we specifically examine the challenges and implications for moderation of content in the Maghrebi Arabic dialects in North Africa.