"Facebook is bad at moderating the Latin alphabet. For the Arabic script, it’s a disaster."

I imagine eastern cultures would find Italian and English rather similar.

Pashto, Dari, Italian, and English are all Indo-European languages. Arabic is not. In other words Afghan languages are closer to English than they are to Arabic.

You're conflating two fundamentally different notions of similarity. The similarity among the Indo-European languages are extremely deep linguistic and structural similarities only appreciated by people who study languages and their history for a living, and known by people who are interested in languages and read about them.

The similarity between same-script languages is a superficial geometric symmetry that can be seen by anyone with functioning eyes. Most people are in the second category while not being in the first.

Only if you already know Italian or English. Personally I would easily confuse Italian with Spanish or Portuguese.

I think your familiarity with the Latin script is coloring your perceptions a bit, I'm an arab and when I was a child I used to classify French, Italian and all languages that use Latin letters as 'English'. Growing up is not what made me realize this is wrong, it's learning English. It's very easy to imagine the other way around.

> I was a child I used to classify French, Italian and all languages that use Latin letters as 'English'.

These three have a lot of words in common. French-English share something like 30% of their respective vocabulary on top of an other 30% they both inherited from Latin. So, you were almost right!

If you are going to write about a topic, perhaps you should have a better understanding of it and its related issues than a child would.