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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Technology
Josh Taylor

Instagram apologises for adding ‘terrorist’ to some Palestinian user profiles

Instagram's logo on a mobile phone screen
Meta inserted the word ‘terrorist’ into some Palestinian Instagram users’ profiles, prompting the company to ‘sincerely apologise’ for what it says was a glitch in auto-translation. Photograph: Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

Meta has apologised after inserting the word “terrorist” into the profile bios of some Palestinian Instagram users, in what the company says was a bug in auto-translation.

The issue, which was first reported by 404media, affected users with the word “Palestinian” written in English on their profile, the Palestinian flag emoji and the word “alhamdulillah” written in Arabic. When auto-translated to English the phrase read: “Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.”

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