Harm Is Behavioural, Moderation Is Lexical: How Language and Culture Decide Whom Automated Safety Systems Protect and Whom They Silence

Gabriel Lars Sabadin, Dr Nicola Harding, Sarah Kingston

Content warning: this paper quotes slurs and hateful statements from published test suites; the racial slur among them is masked. Automated systems decide at scale which messages are harmful, and they decide unevenly. Classifiers label African American English as offensive up to twice as often as other English, the accounts of prominent drag queens can score as more toxic than those of white nationalists, and safety behaviour that holds in English collapses in low-resource languages. We argue that over-flagging and under-protection share one cause: deciding harm from vocabulary and surface form rather than from what a message does. We organise the evidence into seven failure modes and argue, as testable hypotheses, that harmful behaviours (a request for secrecy, a demand for payment, an attempt to isolate someone) travel across languages better than the words that express them. We propose an evaluation protocol that makes the gap between the best- and worst-served language communities a headline result, and show that the naive gap is inflated under equal service and that its usual bootstrap interval is unreliable. Applied to five open systems in eleven languages, from a keyword…