How to Moderate Comments in Arabic on Facebook and Instagram

Facebook calls this Content Moderation, Instagram calls it Hidden Words, and both take a list separated by commas. The steps are identical to any other language. Only what you paste changes, and that is the part nobody hands you.

1. 1Decide which dialect your audience types inNot which country you sell to. Which words appear in your comments. Read the last fifty and you will know. Keep Modern Standard in every list, because most copy and paste scam scripts use it, though nobody comments in it.
2. 2Write the list as Arabic, never as a translationThe scams under Arabic ads were written by different people selling different things, so the wording is regional. راسلني خاص in the Gulf, صيفط ليا in Morocco: same move, no shared letters. Start from your own comments.
3. 3Open the setting and paste it inFacebook: Settings, Privacy, Public Posts, Content Moderation, then Edit. A Page setting, not a Meta Business Suite one. Instagram: Settings and activity, then Hidden Words, then Manage custom words and phrases.
4. 4Check the activity log after a weekThe step people skip, and the one that makes the list real. Every comment that got through is one more entry, in the spelling you saw.

Method 2: Turn on Meta's own filters, and know what they cover

Two of Meta's filters run lists Meta writes, and you cannot see inside either. Both are worth switching on, and both behave differently in Arabic than most blog posts assume.

1. 1Turn on the Page profanity filter, with low expectationsIt sits in the same Content Moderation screen as your keyword list, and Facebook's help documents it as covering US English. It costs one click, so turn it on, but do not build your Arabic moderation around it.
2. 2Open Moderation Assist and add the profanity criteriaSwitch to your Page, open your professional dashboard, and select Moderation Assist. Meta's help lists its profanity detection for English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Italian, Arabic, and Russian. Arabic is genuinely in that set, which is better than most people assume. What Meta does not say is which Arabic, and something built around Modern Standard has little to say about a Darija insult.
3. 3Add the criteria that do not care about languageThe real prize. Hide comments carrying links, and accounts with no profile picture, no followers, or barely any age. None of that reads a word, so it works as well in Arabic as in English. If your scam replies always carry a link, this rule beats 200 keywords.

Facebook says Content Moderation hides common variations of your keywords: misspellings, plurals, abbreviations, and versions written with numbers or symbols. Real, and free. What Meta does not publish is how any of it behaves in Arabic, so assume it does not.

1. 1Cover the alef forms by handTake the five or ten words doing the real work and add the alef variants of each. Not the whole list, or you spend your budget on words nobody misspells. Diacritics you can skip: those marks are rare in comments.
2. 2Deal with stretched lettersحراااام is not حرام to something matching letters, and stretching is how people add feeling, so it lands on the comments you want caught. You cannot list every length. Add the one or two you see, and accept this one is not winnable by list.
3. 3Add Arabizi as its own listTreat it as a second language, because to a filter it is one. Same insult, same scam pitch, Latin letters and numbers. If half your comments arrive this way and your list is all Arabic script, half your comments are unfiltered.

Where an Arabic word list stops

Do all of the above. It is free, and in Arabic it is worth more than the English equivalent. Then look at what you built: a list that has to know every word, in every dialect, in every spelling, across two alphabets, kept current by hand, inside a budget of 1,000.

• You cannot enumerate a language this variable

  In English, one word is roughly one entry. In Arabic, one word is a dialect times a spelling times a script, and every multiplication costs a slot. The list does not lose because it is badly written. It loses on arithmetic.

• Arabizi is invisible, and it is not a niche

  Someone typing 7aram or kteer is writing Arabic, and your list holds not one character of it. Not an edge case you patch: a second spelling system your audience moves in and out of.

• Nothing here reads meaning

  استثمار مضمون, ربح سريع, راسلني وأشرحلك: a scam pitch with no profanity and no banned word reads as a friendly comment to every filter Meta has. Your customers read it as a scam under your ad, because it is.

• The good comments get caught with the bad

  هل هذا نصب is a buyer with an objection, and answering them keeps the sale. Block نصاب and you hide them beside the actual scammers, and never find out.

None of this makes the list a bad idea. It makes it what it is: a good way to block Arabic words you have seen, spelled the way you saw them, in the one dialect you wrote it for.

When it does not work

• Why is my Arabic list catching nothing at all?

  Usually because it was translated rather than written. Machine translating an English spam list gives you Modern Standard phrases no spammer has typed. Build from your actual comments instead. If it was written by hand and still catches nothing, check you saved it in your Page's Settings under Privacy and Public Posts, not in Meta Business Suite.

• Why did a comment get through with a word that is on my list?

  Look at the exact characters. Almost always a different alef, a stretched letter like حراااام against your حرام, or a space dropped inside the phrase. Add the spelling exactly as it appeared. It is also your signal: if you are adding the fourth spelling of one word, the list is not what will fix it.

• Why is Moderation Assist still letting Arabic insults through?

  Its profanity criteria covers Arabic, but you cannot see the list, edit it, or learn why something passed. In practice it is strongest on Modern Standard, which is not what people insult you in. Your own list in the right dialect is the only native answer.

• Why does my list work on some comments and not on half of them?

  Check the alphabet of the ones it missed. Latin letters with numbers are Arabizi, and no Arabic entry will match. Same for comments that start in Darija and finish in French.