Social network called out for ignoring Myanmar violence
LAST week, after frustrated activists from Myanmar sent an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, they got something unexpected: a reply. The activists, representing six civil society organisations, harshly criticised Zuckerberg in the letter, saying he had mischaracterised Facebook’s response to violence-inciting messages in Myanmar and had not devoted sufficient resources to enforcing its hate speech rules in the violence-stricken country. Zuckerberg wrote back to the group the next day from his personal email address, apologising for misspeaking and outlining steps that Facebook was taking to increase its moderation efforts.
Zuckerberg’s email, which was provided to the New York Times by the activist groups, was the chief executive’s first direct communication with the local groups that have criticised Facebook’s role in the country’s growing humanitarian crisis. Facebook has been accused by UN investigators and rights groups of facilitating violence against Rohingya Muslims, a minority ethnic group, by allowing anti-Muslim hate speech and false news to spread on its platform.
Facebook is a dominant source of information in Myanmar, and civil society groups have accused it of being a kind of absentee landlord, with few moderators and systems in place to keep extremists from using Facebook posts to incite violence.
In his email, Zuckerberg said Facebook had added“dozens” of Burmese language content reviewers to monitor reports of hate speech and had “increased the number of people across the company on Myanmar-related issues”, including a product team working on building tools to try to help stem the violence there.
The disagreement centres on a chain letter that spread on Facebook Messenger in Myanmar in September. The messages warned Buddhist communities of an imminent Muslim attack. Meanwhile, Muslim populations received a separate message cautioning them of violence from militant Buddhist groups.
Civil society groups say the messages paralysed major cities in Myanmar and raised fears of a violent clash. Such incitement and scaremongering have become far too typical on Facebook, according to the groups, which say Facebook has repeatedly failed to follow through on promises to devote more resources to the issues.
In an interview last week, Zuckerberg appeared to hold up the September episode as a model of Facebook’s effectiveness, and said the company’s systems had detected the messages and stopped them. In fact, the activists said, they flagged the messages repeatedly to Facebook, barraging its employees with strongly worded appeals until the com- pany finally stepped in to help.
Zuckerberg’s personal email did not quell the activists’ frustration. The groups say the biggest obstruction to their attempts to push back against a torrent of dangerous hate speech is not their lack of resources but Facebook itself. They said Facebook had a history of pledging to do more to help quell ethnic violence in Myanmar but had not fulfilled its promises.
“It’s great that he’s engaging personally with this, but the stuff he’s talking about is really not that much different from what they’ve been saying for the past few years,” said Jes Petersen, chief executive of Phandeeyar, an innovation lab in Myanmar that has worked with Facebook to produce localised versions of its community standards.
A Facebook spokeswoman, Debbie Frost, confirmed the authenticity of Zuckerberg’s email, and said Facebook was planning to continue engaging with the activists.
Years after civil society groups first began flagging hate speech in Myanmar, the company still has no permanent office or staff in the country and seems to be struggling to give its platform sufficient oversight. In Germany, where hate speech laws require vigilant attention from content reviewers, Facebook has hired about 1,200 moderators. In order to achieve the same ratio of users to moderators in Myanmar, Facebook would need to have around 800 reviewers in the country, Petersen calculated.