Facebook must act to stop incitement, warns Myanmar

YANGON: Myanmar’s 2020 elections may be fertile ground for “incitement to violence” and Facebook should prepare now, an assessment of the tech giant’s presence in the country warned on Tuesday, as it detailed how the platform had been used to spread hate.

Facebook has for years come under fire from rights groups for its slow response to abusive posts, with the country’s Rohingyas bearing the brunt of the invective.

Language portraying the Rohingya in sub-human terms or as terrorists on the network helped drum up support for a military crackdown that forced more than 720,000 of the stateless minority to flee the country last year.

Facebook has blacklisted several hardline monks, and after a UN probe called for the army chief and other top military brass to be prosecuted for genocide, the platform blocked them too.

It also commissioned an assessment on its performance by California-based consultants Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), which carried out interviews between May and September 2018.

While BSR agreed that the platform had been used by those “seeking to incite violence and cause offline harm”, it also said Facebook’s link to rights violations “should not be overestimated” and that the state bore ultimate responsibility. But it also warned that Facebook’s problems in Myanmar are far from over.

The upcoming election in 2020 is “likely to be a flashpoint for hate speech, harassment, misinformation, incitement to violence, and other actions designed to undermine the political process”, it said.

Facebook should be prepared for “multiple eventualities” now, it said, without going into detail.

Civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi won the 2015 vote, ending decades of military rule. But her administration — which is in an uneasy power-sharing agreement with the military — has floundered in handling the Rohingya crisis.

The assessment additionally warned that authorities and nationalists in the country have become more sophisticated in targeting civil society groups and activists on the platform.