People are depending more and more on technologies that sometimes, technologies turn their backs on them.
A Palestinian worker was arrested because the Israel Police relied on automatic translation software to translate a post he wrote on his Facebook Page.
The man who works in the West Bank settlement of Beitar Ilit near Jerusalem, posted a photo of himself leaning against a bulldozer alongside the caption: “يصبحهم”, or “yusbihuhum”, which translates as “good morning” in Arabic.
The unfortunate Palestinian was arrested because Facebook's automatic translation tool translated the greeting into "attack them" in Hebrew and "hurt them" in English.
Facebook users who couldn't speak Arabic notified this post to the Judea and Samaria District, who in turn thought that the man had bad intention. The police officers were suspicious because the translation accompanied a picture of the man alongside the bulldozer, a vehicle that has been used in the past in hit-and-run terrorist attacks.
They suspected the man was threatening to carry out such an attack.
The Israeli Defense Force has been open about monitoring the social media accounts of Palestinians, looking for "lone-wolf" attackers who might otherwise slip through its net.
Through the internet, the Israelis were scouting to find radicalization or potential terror attacks.
And in this case, the West Bank is largely Israeli controlled, though pockets have joint Israeli-Palestinian control and conflict over contested land is ongoing.
When this man was arrested, he had no idea what was going on, when the police dragged him to the station.
Fortunately, he was released a few hours later after questioning.
The police realized their mistake, and after confirming that it was Facebook's tool that made them lost in translation, the police agreed that the correct translation was "good morning."
On the web, Arabic speakers explained that English transliteration used by Facebook is not an actual word in Arabic, but could indeed look like the verb "to hurt."
Only Arabic speakers who could clearly see that the transliteration did not match the translation.
Arabic is considered particularly difficult for many machine translation services due to the large number of different dialects in use by its speakers from many parts around the world, on top of Modern Standard Arabic, the international form of the language.
The Palestinian man removed the post from his Facebook Page soon after his release.
For its part, Facebook also apologized, and said that it is looking into the issue
"Unfortunately, our translation systems made an error last week that misinterpreted what this individual posted," said Necip Fazil Ayan, an engineering manager at Facebook.
"Even though our translations are getting better each day, mistakes like these might happen from time to time and we’ve taken steps to address this particular issue. We apologize to him and his family for the mistake and the disruption this caused."
Facebook originally used Microsoft’s translation AI, but began developing and using its own translation software in 2016.
Facebook's translation tool is entirely powered by AI. Around 4.5 billion translations are made each day across the social network using this tool.