LLMHigh
Facebook translates 'good morning' into 'attack them', leading to arrest
- Occurred
- Oct 17, 2017
- Published
- Oct 24, 2017
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Facebook's automatic language translation software incorrectly translated an Arabic post saying "Good morning" into Hebrew saying "hurt them," leading to the arrest of a Palestinian man in Beitar Illit, Israel.
Developers
Deployers
Harmed parties
- unnamed Palestinian Facebook user
- Palestinian Facebook users
- Arabic-speaking Facebook users
- Facebook users
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: Translation error caused arrest, representing significant harm from AI failure.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8