Facebook has apologised and blamed the computers for wrongly translating Chinese President Xi Jinping’s name as “Mr Sh*thole”.
The error occurred during Mr Jinping’s first official trip to Myanmar, where he was signing infrastructure investment deals in the country as part of China’s Belt and Road initiative.
According to Reuters, Facebook blamed the translation error on a “technical issue that caused incorrect translations from Burmese to English on Facebook”.
“This should not have happened and we are taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” Facebook’s statement said. “We sincerely apologise for the offence this has caused.”
Mr Jinping’s name and proper translation was missing from the Burmese language database on Facebook and so the algorithms took a stab at a translation.
Facebook has had problems with the Burmese language in the past.
A 2018 Reuters report on how Facebook was failing to police hate speech on the platform while the government engaged in a “genocidal” persecution of Rohingya Muslims cited several examples of translations being inaccurate, perhaps for the best as the posts were encouraging genocide.
The UN criticised Facebook as the platform was being used to incite violence against Rohingyas, with one investigator saying the platform had “turned into a beast”.
One post advocating the killing of Muslims was mistranslated as “I shouldn’t have a rainbow in Myanmar”.
Ironically, this mistranslation is one of the better examples of the social network actually managing to police hate speech and stopping its spread, but it did result in Facebook temporarily disabling Burmese translation in 2018.
Facebook is used around the world by billions of people but is not accessible in mainland China, (it can be accessed from Hong Kong).
That doesn’t stop the country being the social media platform’s second biggest customer after the United States.
Chinese companies advertise heavily on the platform, and Facebook is reportedly creating a new team to focus on building the incredibly lucrative Chinese advertising business.