[Air-L] New CDT Report - Content Moderation in the Global South: A Comparative Study of Four Low-Resource Languages & Public Webinar Aug 7, 2025.

[Dhanaraj Thakur]

Hi everyone,

Over the past 18 months, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) has
been studying how content moderation systems operate across multiple
regions in the Global South. Our team studied four languages: Maghrebi
Arabic, Kiswahili, Tamil, and Quechua. We are excited to announce the
publication of a new research report, "Content Moderation in the Global
South: A Comparative Study of Four Low-Resource Languages
<https://cdt.org/insights/content-moderation-in-the-global-south-a-comparative-study-of-four-low-resource-languages/>"
which compares and synthesize the insights we gained from studying the four
regions and includes our recommendations for improving content moderation
in low-resource languages of the Global South.

We invite you to join us for a public webinar on August 7th, 2025 at 9AM
ET, where we will explore key themes from the study. RSVP to attend:
Interrogating
content moderation systems in indigenous and low-resource languages of the
Global South
<https://cdt.org/event/interrogating-content-moderation-systems-in-indigenous-and-low-resource-languages-of-the-global-south/>.
Live interpretation will be available in English, Swahili, Arabic, and
Spanish.

In brief our findings suggest that:

   -

   Currently, global tech companies use two main approaches to content
   moderation: Global and Local. Many of these “global” policies applied
   uniformly across regions at scale often originate from U.S. laws and norms
   and can ignore unique linguistic and cultural nuances. The local approach
   involves tailoring policies, particularly those related to cultural
   matters, to specific regions. This approach, despite its promise of
   inclusivity, sometimes poses obstacles and limitations on users trying to
   challenge local norms that violate their rights.
   -

   The use of global and local approaches combined with the outsourcing of
   content moderation for the low-resource languages can lead to ineffective
   moderation and pressure on human moderators working for these companies.
   For example, moderators from a single country are often tasked with
   moderating content from across their region, despite dialectical and
   contextual variations.
   -

   Resistance is a common phenomenon among users in the Global South. Many
   users across the case studies employed various tactics to circumvent and
   even resist against what they saw as undue moderation. This involved
   changing letters in the language, using emojis, uploading random content
   alongside material they believed would be restricted, and avoiding certain
   words. In other cases, users realized that the automated tools used by the
   platforms did not understand their indigenous language and so they simply
   posted in that language to avoid moderation.
   -

   Lastly, many NLP researchers and language technology experts in the
   Global South have developed tools and strategies to improve moderation in
   many low-resource languages. However, these scholars and experts often feel
   underutilized or unheard by tech companies

You can access the full report here
<https://cdt.org/insights/content-moderation-in-the-global-south-a-comparative-study-of-four-low-resource-languages/>
for detailed insights, or read threads on Bsky
<https://bsky.app/profile/cdt.org/post/3ltkdrfw6c726> and LinkedIn
<https://www.linkedin.com/posts/center-for-democracy-%26-technology_over-18-months-cdt-studied-content-moderation-activity-7348765548677095424-5XR7?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABmRVjQBbSXIuPC3_K9dGpdU_vv3AzZW62k>
.

Join us for our public webinar and launch event–Interrogating content
moderation systems in indigenous and low-resource languages of the Global
South
<https://cdt.org/event/interrogating-content-moderation-systems-in-indigenous-and-low-resource-languages-of-the-global-south/>
on August 7th, and in the interim we invite you to read and share this
report within your networks. We also welcome your feedback.

Thanks,

Dhanaraj