Facebook says it was ‘too slow’ to fight hate speech in Myanmar

YANGON: SOME 700,000 ROHINGYA FLED THEIR HOMES LAST YEAR AFTER AN ARMY CRACKDOWN THAT THE UNITED STATES DENOUNCED AS ETHNIC CLEANSING.

Facebook has been “too slow” to address hate speech in Myanmar and is acting to remedy the problem by hiring more Burmese speakers and investing in technology to identify problematic content, the company said in a statement on Thursday.

The acknowledgement came a day after a Reuters investigation showed why the company has failed to stem a wave of vitriolic posts about the minority Rohingya.

“The ethnic violence in Myanmar is horrific and we have been too slow to prevent misinformation and hate speech on Facebook,” Facebook said.

The Reuters story revealed the social media giant for years dedicated scant resources to combating hate speech in Myanmar, which is a market it dominates and where there have been repeated eruptions of ethnic violence.

In early 2015, for instance, there were only two people at Facebook who could speak Burmese monitoring problematic posts.

In Thursday’s statement, posted online, Facebook said it was using tools to automatically detect hate speech and hiring more Burmese-language speakers to review posts, following up on a pledge made by founder Mark Zuckerberg to U.S. senators in April.

The company said that it had over 60 “Myanmar language experts” in June and plans to have at least 100 by the end of the year.

Reuters found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments, images and videos denigrating and attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims that were on the social media platform as of last week.

Some of the material, which included pornographic antiMuslim images, has been up on Facebook for as long as six years.